I 


!?!*{i!!!M;i;::- 


1 


THE 

ROMANTIC    MOVEMENT 

IN 

ENGLISH  POETRY 


ARTHUR   SYMONS 

AUTHOR  OF   "STUDIES  IN  SEVEN   ARTS,"    "CITIES 
ITALY,"    "PLAYS,  ACTING  AND  MUSIC,"   ETC. 


^BAR 
"*     OF   THE 

UNIVERSITY 

3F 


NEW  YORK 
E.  P.  DUTTON  AND  COMPANY 

31  West  23rd  Street 
1909 


f 


/ 


COPYRIGHT,    1909,    BY   ARCHIBALD    CONSTABLE   AND   COMI 
ALL    RIGHTS   RESERVED 


mi 


KI 

THEODORE  WATTS-DUNTON 
BARO  LILENGO  SIKIMASKERO 
GUDLO  ROMANO  GIAMANGERO 


192873 


iNlVERSlTY 


PREFACE 


In  calling  my  book  the  'Romantic  Movement  in  English 
Poetry !  I  do  not  wish  that  title  to  be  taken  in  too  exclusive 
a  sense.  The  word  'romantic/  I  think,  defines  more  clearly 
than  any  other  what  we  find  most  characteristic  in  the  renewal 
of  poetry  after  its  long  banishment.  The  great  poets  of  every 
age  but  the  eighteenth  have  been  romantic :  what  are  Chaucer, 
Shakespeare,  and  Coleridge  if  not  romantic?  But  in  using  the 
convenient  word  '  movement '  I  wish  it  to  be  understood  that 
it  is  not  meant  in  the  usual  historical  sense,  or  with  the  defi- 
niteness  with  which  we  say,  for  example,  theTractarian  or  the 
Agrarian  Movement.  There  a  definite  aim  sets  many  minds 
working  together,  not  in  mere  comradeship.  No  such  thing 
ever  happened  in  the  creation  of  literature.  It  is  each  one  of 
these  poets  whom  I  want  to  study,  finding  out,  if  I  can,  what 
he  was  in  himself,  what  he  made  of  himself  in  his  work,  and  by 
what  means,  impulses,  and  instincts.  The  poet,  the  poem,  — 
it  is  with  these  only  that  I  am  concerned. 

And,  again  for  convenience,  I  have  set  limits  to  my  plan. 
The  year  1800  is  taken  as  a  sort  of  centre;  or  shall  I  say  a 
barrier,  which  shuts  out  every  writer  of  verse  who  was  born 
after  that  year,  and  lets  through  every  one  who  survived  from 
the  eighteenth  into  the  nineteenth  century.  My  plan  allows 
me  no  choice  between  good  or  bad  writers  inverse:  I  give  each 
his  due  consideration,  his  due  space,  of  a  few  lines  or  of  many 
pages.  And  I  have  given  each  in  chronological  order,  with  the 
dates  of  his  birth  and  death  and  of  the  first  edition  of  his 
published  volumes  of  verse.  I  have  consulted  no  histories  of 
literature,  nor  essays  about  it,  except  for  the  bare  facts  of  a 
man's  life  or  work;  but  I  have  tried  to  get  at  one  thing  only: 
the  poet  in  his  poetry,  his  poetry  in  the  poet;  it  is  the  same 
thing. 


CONTENTS 

•    Introduction 3 

John  Home  (1722-1808) 23 

"*  Dr.  Erasmus  Darwin  (1731-1802) 23 

James  Beattie  (1735-1803) 26 

John  Wolcot  (1738-1819) 27 

William  Combe  (1741-1823) 28 

Anna  L^etitia  Barbauld  (1743-1825) 30 

Hannah  More  (1745-1833) 30 

William  Hayley  (1745-1820) 32 

Charles  Dibdin  (1745-1814) 34 

John  O'Keeeee  (1747-1833) 34 

John  Philpot  Curran  (1750-1817) 36 

William  Gifford  (1756-1826) 37 

William  Blake  (1757-1827) 37- 

-  George  Crabbe  (1758-1832) 52 

Mrs.  Mary  Robinson  (1758-1800) 61 

Joanna  Baillie  (1762-1851) 63 

Sir  Samuel  Egerton  Brydges  (1762-1837)       ....  65 

William  Lisle  Bowles  (1762-1850) 65 

George  Colman  the  Younger  (1762-1836)       ....  67 

Samuel  Rogers  (1763-1855) 68 

Henry  Luttrell  (1765-1851) 73 

Carolina,  Lady  Nairne  (1766-1845) 73 

Robert  Bloomfteld  (1766-1823) 74 

John  Hookham  Frere  (1769-1846) 75 

»    William  Wordsworth  (1770-1850) 78 

/James  Hogg  (1770-1835) 97 

Geo  ge  Canning  (1770-1827) 106 

Henry  Boyd  (1770-1832) 107 


x  CONTENTS 

.      Sib  Walter  Scott  (1771-1832) 108 

James  Montgomery  (1771-1854) 119 

Mrs.  Tighe  (1772-1810) 121 

Henry  Francis  Cary  (1772-1844) 122 

.     Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  (1772-1834) T123I 

Robert  Southey  (1774-1843) 148 

Robert  Tannahill  (1774-1810) 161 

Charles  Lamb  (1775-1834) 161 

Charles  Lloyd  (1775-1839) 167 

Joseph  Blanco  White  (1775-1840) 169 

Thomas  Dermody  (1775-1802) 170 

Dr.  John  Leydkn  (1775-1811) 171 

Walter  Savage  Landor  (1775-1864) 172  - 

James  and  Horatio  Smith  (1775-1839  ;  1779-1849)      .        .  189 

Thomas  Campbell  (1775-1844) 191 

Thomas  Moore  (1779-1852) 200 

Robert  Eyres  Landor  (1781-1869) 207 

Edward,  Baron  Thurlow  (1781-1829) 209 

*Ebenezer  Elliott  (1781-1849) 209 

William  Nicholson  (1782-1849) 213 

Ann  and  Jane  Taylor  (1782-1866 ;  1783-1824)       .        .        .213 

Reginald  Heber  (1783-1826) 215 

James  Sheridan  Knowles  (1784-1862) 216 

Bernard  Barton  (1784-1849) 217 

William  Tennant  (1784-1848) 217 

James  Henry  Leigh  Hunt  (1784-1859)         ....  218 

Allan  Cunningham  (1784-1842) 227 

Rev.  Charles  Strong  (1785-1864) 228 

Henry  Kirke  White  (1785-1806) 22S 

Thomas  Love  Peacock  (1785-1866) 230 

John  Wilson  (1785-1841) 231 

Sir  Aubrey  de  Vere  (1786-1846) 232 

Caroline  Anne  Bowles  Southey  (1786-1854)          .        .        .  233 

George  Beattie  (1786-1823) 23* 


CONTENTS  xi 

Mary  Russell  Mitford  (1787-1855) 234 

Bryan  Waller  Procter  :  Barry  Cornwall  (1787-1874)  .  236 

"^-George  Gordon,  Lord  Byron  (1788-1824)       .        .        .        .239 

Richard  Harris  Barham  (1788-1845) 263 

VRev.  Henry  Hart  Milman  (1791-1868) 265 

Rev.  Charles  Wolfe  (1791-1823) 266 

N  <Percy  Bysshe  Shelley  (1792-1822) 268 

v£Ev.  John  Keble  (1792-1866) 286 

Dr.  William  Maginn  (1793-1842) 286 

WOHN  Clare  (1793-1864) 288 

Felicia  Dorothea  Hemans  (1793-1835) 293 

John  Gibson  Lockhart  (1794-1854) 295 

Thomas  Carlyle  (1795-1881) 297 

John  Keats  (1795-1821) 298 

~George  Darley~(1795-I816) 315 

Jeremiah  Joseph  Callanan  (1795-1829)       ....  318 

Sir  Thomas  Noon  Talfourd  (1795-1854)         ....  319 

"-John  Hamilton  Reynolds  (1796-1852) 320 

Da vtd  Hartley  Coleridge  (1796-1849) 321 

William  Motherwell  (1797-1835) 323 

Samuel  Lover  (1797-1868) 324 

Robert  Pollok  (1798-1827) 325 

David  Macbeth  Moir  (1798-1851) 325 

William  Thom  (1798-1848) 326 

Thomas  Hood  (1799-1845) 328 

The  Minors 333 

Note 340 

Index 341 


Ages  are  all  equal;  but  genius  is  always  above  the  age.'  —  Blake. 


OF   THE  „°^ 

UNIVERSITY., 

OF 


C  MOV 


THE  KOMANTIC  MOVEMENT 
IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


INTRODUCTION 


Coleridge  defined  prose  as  'words  in  good  order/  poetry  as 
'the  best  words  in  the  best  order.'  But  there  is  no  reason 
why  prose  should  not  be  the  best  words  in  the  best  order. 
Rhythm  alone,  and  rhythm  of  a  regular  and  recurrent  kind 
only,  distinguishes  poetry  from  prose.  It  was  contended  by  an 
Oxford  professor  of  poetry,  Mr.  W.  J.  Courthope,  that  the 
lines  of  Marlowe,  — 

'  Was  this  the  face  that  launched  a  thousand  ships, 
And  burned  the  topless  towers  of  Ilium?  ' 

are  of  a  different  substance  from  the  substance  of  prose,  and 
that  it  is  certain  that  Marlowe  '  could  only  have  ventured  on 
the  sublime  audacity  that  a  face  launched  ships  and  burned 
towers  by  escaping  from  the  limits  of  ordinary  language,  and 
conveying  his  metaphor  through  the  harmonious  and  ecstatic 
movement  of  rhythm  and  metre.'  To  this  it  may  be  answered 
that  any  writer  of  elevated  prose,  Milton  or  Ruskin,  could 
have  said  in  prose  precisely  what  Marlowe  said  in  verse,  and 
could  have  made  fine  prose  of  it :  the  imagination,  the  idea, 
a  fine  kind  of  form,  would  have  been  there ;  only  one  thing 
would  have  been  lacking,  the  very  finest  kind  of  form,  the 
form  of  verse.  It  would  have  been  poetical  substance,  not 
poetry ;  the  rhythm  transforms  it  into  poetry,  and  nothing  but 
the  rhythm. 

When  Wordsworth  declares,  in  the  Preface  to  the  '  Lyrical 
Ballads,'  that  'there  neither  is  nor  can  be  any  essential  differ- 


4     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ence  between  the  language  of  prose  and  metrical  composition/ 
he  is  perfectly  right,  and  Coleridge  is  certainly  wrong  in  saying, 
'  I  write  in  metre  because  I  am  about  to  use  a  language  dif- 
ferent from  that  of  prose.'  Both  forget  that  what  must  be 
assumed  is  poetical  substance,  and  that,  given  poetical  sub- 
stance, the  actual  language  of  the  prose  and  of  the  verse  may 
very  well  be  identical.  When  Coleridge  says  that  he  would 
have  preferred  'Alice  Fell'  in  prose,  he  is,  very  justly,  criticis- 
ing the  substance  of  that  'metrical  composition/  which  is 
wholly  unpoetical :  there,  and  not  in  the  language,  is  the  dis- 
tinction between  its  essential  prose  and  poetry. 

There  is  in  prose,  whenever  it  is  good  prose,  but  not  neces- 
sarily inherent  in  it,  a  certain  rhythm,  much  laxer  than  that 
of  verse,  not,  indeed,  bound  by  formal  laws  at  all ;  but,  in  its 
essence,  like  the  intonation  which  distinguishes  one  voice  from 
another  in  the  repetition  of  a  single  phrase.  Prose,  in  its  rudi- 
mentary stage,  is  merely  recorded  speech;  but,  as  one  may 
talk  in  prose  all  one's  life  without  knowing  it,  so  it  may  be 
that  the  conscious  form  of  verse  (speech,  that  is,  reduced  to 
rules,  and  regarded  as  partly  of  the  nature  of  music)  was  of 
earlier  origin.  A  certain  stage  of  civilisation  must  have  been 
reached  before  it  could  have  occurred  to  any  one  that  ordinary 
speech  was  worth  being  preserved.  Verse  is  more  easily 
remembered  than  prose,  because  of  its  recurrent  beat,  and 
whatever  men  thought  worth  remembering,  either  for  its 
beauty  (as  a  song  or  hymn)  or  for  its  utility  (as  a  kw),  would 
naturally  be  put  into  verse.  Verse  may  well  have  anticipated 
the  existence  of  writing,  but  hardly  prose.  The  writing-down 
of  verse,  to  this  day,  is  almost  a  materialization  of  it;  but 
prose  exists  only  as  a  written  document. 

The  rhythm  of  verse,  that  rhythm  which  distinguishes  it 
from  prose,  has  never  been  traced  with  any  certainty  to  its 
origin.  It  is  not  even  certain  whether  its  origin  is  consequent 
upon  the  origin  of  music,  or  whether  the  two  are  independent 
in  their  similar  but  by  no  means  identical  capacity.   That  a 


INTRODUCTION  5 

sense  of  regular  cadence,  though  no  sense  of  rhyme,  is  inherent 
in  our  nature,  such  as  it  now  is,  may  be  seen  by  the  invariably 
regular  rhythm  of  children's  songs  and  of  the  half-inarticulate 
verse  arrangements  by  which  they  accompany  their  games, 
and  by  the  almost  invariable  inaccuracy  of  their  rhymes.  It 
is  equally  evident  that  the  pleasure  which  we  derive  from  the 
regular  beat  of  verse  is  inherent  in  use,  from  the  susceptibil- 
ity of  children  to  every  form  of  regular  rhythm,  from  the 
rocking  of  the  cradle  to  the  sound  of  a  lullaby.  Prose  cuts  itself 
sharply  off  from  this  great  inheritance  of  susceptibility  to 
regular  rhythm,  and  thus,  by  what  is  looked  upon  as  natural 
or  instinctive  in  it,  begins  its  existence  a  lawless  and  ac- 
cidental thing. 

In  its  origin,  prose  is  in  no  sense  an  art,  and  it  never  has 
and  never  will  become  an  art,  strictly  speaking,  as  verse  is,  or 
painting,  or  music.  Gradually  it  has  found  out  its  capacities; 
it  has  discovered  how  what  is  useful  in  it  can  be  trained  to 
beauty;  it  has  learned  to  set  limits  to  what  is  unbounded  in  it, 
and  to  follow,  at  a  distance,  some  of  the  laws  of  verse.  Gradu- 
ally it  has  developed  laws  of  its  own,  which,  however,  by  the 
nature  of  its  existence,  are  less  definite,  less  peculiar  to  it  as  a 
form,  than  those  of  verse.  Everything  that  touches  literature 
as  literature  affects  prose,  which  has  come  to  be  the  larger  half 
of  what  we  call  literature. 

It  is  the  danger  and  privilege  of  prose  that  it  has  no  limits. 
The  very  form  of  verse  is  a  concentration ;  you  can  load  every 
rift  with  more  ore.  Prose,  with  its  careless  lineage  direct  from 
speech,  has  a  certain  impromptu  and  casualness  about  it ;  it 
has  allowed  itself  so  much  licence  among  trivialities  that  a  too 
serious  demeanour  surprises;  we  are  apt  to  be  repelled  by  a  too 
strait  observance  of  law  on  the  part  of  one  not  really  a  citizen. 
And  there  is  one  thing  that  prose  cannot  do;  it  cannot  sing. 
A  distinction  there  is  between  prose  and  lyrical  verse,  even  in 
actual  language,  because  here  words  are  used  by  rhythm  as 
notes  in  music,  and  at  times  with  hardly  more  than  that  musi- 


6    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

cal  meaning.  As  Joubert  has  said,  in  a  figure  which  is  a  precise 
definition:  'In  the  style  of  poetry  every  word  reverberates 
like  the  sound  of  a  well-tuned  lyre,  and  leaves  after  it  number- 
less undulations.'  The  words  may  be  the  same,  no  rarer;  the 
construction  may  be  the  same,  or,  by  preference,  simpler; 
but,  as  the  rhythm  comes  into  it,  there  will  come  also  some- 
thing which,  though  it  may  be  born  of  music,  is  not  music. 
Call  it  atmosphere,  call  it  magic;  say,  again  with  Joubert: 
'  Fine  verses  are  those  that  exhale  like  sounds  or  perfumes ' ; 
we  shall  never  explain,  though  we  may  do  something  to 
distinguish,  that  transformation  by  which  prose  is  changed 
miraculously  into  poetry. 

Again,  it  is  Joubert  who  has  said  once  and  for  all  the  signi- 
ficant thing : '  Nothing  is  poetry  which  does  not  transport :  the 
lyre  is  in  a  certain  sense  a  winged  instrument.'  Prose  indeed 
may  transport  us,  though  not  of  the  necessity  with  which 
poetry  is  bound  to  do  so.  But,  in  all  the  transport  of  prose, 
something  holds  us  to  the  ground;  for  prose,  though  it  may 
range  more  widely,  has  no  wings.  That  is  why  substance  is  of 
so  much  greater  importance  in  prose  than  in  verse,  and  why 
a  prose-writer,  Balzac  or  Scott,  can  be  a  great  writer,  a  great 
novelist,  and  yet  not  a  great  writer  of  prose ;  here,  as  elsewhere, 
prose  makes  conquest  of  new  tracts  of  the  earth,  with  leave 
to  fix  firm  foundations  there,  by  its  very  lack  of  skill  in  flight. 
The  prose  play,  the  novel,  come  into  being  as  exceptions,  are 
invented  by  men  who  cannot  write  plays  in  verse,  who  cannot 
write  epics ;  and,  the  usurper  once  firmly  settled,  a  new  dynasty 
begins,  which  we  come  to  call  legitimate,  as  is  the  world's  way 
with  all  dynasties. 

Prose  is  the  language  of  what  we  call  real  life,  and  it  is  only 
in  prose  that  an  illusion  of  external  reality  can  be  given. 
Compare,  not  only  the  surroundings,  the  sense  of  time,  local- 
ity, but  the  whole  process  and  existence  of  character,  in  a 
play  of  Shakespeare  and  in  a  novel  of  Balzac.  I  choose  Balzac 
among  novelists,  because  his  mind  is  nearer  to  what  is  creative 


INTRODUCTION  7 

in  the  poet's  mind  than  that  of  any  novelist,  and  his  method 
nearer  to  the  method  of  the  poet.  Take  King  Lear  and  take 
Pere  Goriot.  Goriot  is  a  Lear  at  heart,  and  he  suffers  the  same 
tortures  and  humiliations.  But  precisely  where  Lear  grows  up 
before  the  mind's  eye  into  a  vast  cloud  and  shadowy  monu- 
ment of  trouble,  Goriot  grows  downward  into  the  earth  and 
takes  root  there,  wrapping  the  dust  about  all  his  fibres.  It  is 
part  of  his  novelty  that  he  comes  so  close  to  us  and  is  so  recog- 
nisable. Lear  may  exchange  his  crown  for  the  fool's  bauble, 
knowing  nothing  of  it ;  but  Goriot  knows  well  enough  the  value 
of  every  banknote  that  his  daughters  rob  him  of.  In  that 
definiteness,  that  new  power  of  'stationing'  emotion  in  a 
firm  and  material  way,  lies  one  of  the  great  opportunities  of 
prose. 

The  novel  and  the  prose  play  are  the  two  great  imaginative 
forms  which  prose  has  invented  for  itself.  The  essay  corre- 
sponds in  a  sense  to  meditative  poetry:  has  the  lyric  any 
analogue  in  prose?  None,  I  think,  in  structural  form,  though 
there  may  be  outbursts,  in  such  elaborate  prose  as  De  Quin- 
cey's,  which  are  perhaps  only  too  lyrical,  and  seem  to  recog- 
nise a  more  fixed  and  releasing  rhythm,  that  of  verse.  The 
prose  of  science,  philosophy,  and  even  history,  has  few  funda- 
mental duties  to  literature,  or  to  prose  as  a  fine  art.  Science, 
when  it  is  not  pure  speculation,  is  concerned  with  mere  facts, 
or  theories  of  facts ;  and  where  a  fact  in  itself  is  more  import- 
ant than  the  expression  or  illumination  of  that  fact,  there 
can  be  no  literature.  Philosophers  have  often  been  dreamers, 
poets  turned  inside  out ;  and  such  may  well  bring  concrete 
beauty  into  the  domain  of  abstract  thought.  But  for  the  most 
part  philosophers  have  regarded  prose  much  as  ascetics  have 
regarded  the  body ;  as  a  necessary  part  of  matter,  a  necessary 
evil.  To  the  historian  prose  becomes  much  more  important, 
yet  remains  less  important  than  it  is  to  the  novelist.  The  his- 
torian, after  all,  like  the  man  of  science,  is  concerned  primarily 
with  facts.  He  undertakes  to  tell  us  the  truth  about  the  past, 


8  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  it  is  only  when  he  competes  with  the  novelist,  and  attempts 
psychology,  that  he  is  free  to  become  a  writer  of  actual  litera- 
ture. Much  fine  literature  has  been  written  under  the  name  of 
criticism.  But  for  the  critic  to  aim  at  making  literature  is  to 
take  off  something  from  the  value  of  his  criticism  as  criticism. 
It  may  produce  a  work  of  higher  value.  But  it  will  cease  to  be, 
properly  speaking,  what  we  distinguish  as  criticism. 

Only  in  the  novel  and  in  the  prose  play  does  prose  become 
free  to  create,  free  to  develop  to  the  utmost  limits  of  its  vital- 
ity. Together  with  fiction  I  would  include  autobiography, 
perhaps  of  all  forms  of  fiction  the  most  convincing.  In  all  these 
we  see  prose  at  work  directly  on  life.  '  The  sense  of  cadence  in 
prose,' says  Remyde  Gourmont, '  has  nothing  in  common  with 
the  sense  of  music ;  it  is  a  sense  wholly  physiological.  We  set 
our  sensations  obscurely  to  rhythm,  like  prolonged  cries  of  joy 
or  sorrow.  And  thus  everything  can  give  finer  shades,  and 
adapt  itself  better  to  thought,  in  prose  than  in  verse.'  It  is 
thus  in  prose  that  men  confess  themselves,  with  minute  fidel- 
ity ;  Rousseau's  '  Confessions'  could  have  been  written  only  in 
prose.  All  the  best  fiction,  narrative  or  dramatic,  is  a  form  of 
confession,  personal  or  vicarious;  and,  in  a  sense,  it  is  all  per- 
sonal; for  no  novelist  or  dramatist  ever  rendered  vitally  a 
single  sensation  which  he  had  not  observed  in  himself  or  which 
he  had  not  tested  by  himself.  In  verse  even  Villon  cannot 
'rhythme  ses  sensations'  so  minutely  as  Rousseau  can  in 
prose.  The  form  forces  him  to  give  only  the  essence  of  his 
sensations,  and  to  give  them  in  a  manner  modified  by  that 
form.  In  prose  we  can  almost  think  in  words.  Perhaps  the 
highest  merit  of  prose  consists  in  this,  that  it. allows  us  to 
think  in  words. 

There  is  no  form  of  art  which  is  not  an  attempt  to  capture 
life,  to  create  life  over  again.  But  art,  in  verse,  being  strictly 
and  supremely  an  art,  begins  by  transforming.  Prose  fiction 
transforms,  it  is  true,  it  cannot  help  transforming;  but  by  its 
nature  it  is  able  to  follow  line  for  line  in  a  way  that  verse  can 


INTRODUCTION  9 

never  do.  'The  artifices  of  rhythm,'  said  Poe,  'are  an  insuper- 
able bar  to  the  development  of  all  points  of  thought  or  ex- 
pression which  have  their  basis  in  truth.  .  .  .  One  writer  of 
the  prose  tale,  in  short,  may  bring  to  his  theme  a  vast  variety 
of  modes  or  inflexion  of  thought  and  expression  —  (the  ratio- 
cinative,  for  example,  the  sarcastic  or  humorous)  which  are 
not  only  antagonistical  to  the  nature  of  the  poem,  but  abso- 
lutely forbidden  by  one  of  its  most  peculiar  and  indispens- 
able adjuncts:  we  allude,  of  course,  to  rhythm.'  It  is,  in 
fact,  that  physiological  quality  which  gives  its  chief  power,  its 
rarest  subtlety,  to  prose.  Prose  listens  at  the  doors  of  all  the 
senses,  and  repeats  their  speech  almost  in  their  own  tones. 
But  poetry  (it  is  again  Baudelaire  who  says  it)  'is  akin  to 
music  through  a  prosody  whose  roots  plunge  deeper  in  the 
human  soul  than  any  classical  theory  has  indicated.'  Poetry 
begins  where  prose  ends,  and  it  is  at  its  chief  peril  that  it 
begins  sooner.  The  one  safeguard  for  the  poet  is  to  say  to 
himself:  What  I  can  write  in  prose  I  will  not  allow  myself 
to  write  in  verse,  out  of  mere  honour  towards  my  material. 
The  further  I  can  extend  my  prose,  the  further  back  do  I  set 
the  limits  of  verse.  The  region  of  poetry  will  thus  be  always 
the  beyond,  the  ultimate,  and  with  the  least  possible  chance 
of  any  confusion  of  territory. 


Critics  or  historians  of  poetry  are  generally  concerned  with 
everything  but  what  is  essential  in  it.  They  deal  with  poetry 
as  if  it  were  a  fashion,  finding  merit  in  its  historical  signi- 
ficance, as  we  find  interest  in  an  early  Victorian  bonnet,  not 
because  it  is  beautiful,  but  because  people  once  thought  it 
'  genteel.'  But  poetry  is  a  reality,  an  essence,  and  is  unchanged 
by  any  change  in  fashion ;  and  it  is  the  critic's  business  to  find 
it  where  it  is,  to  proclaim  it  for  what  it  is,  and  to  realise  that 
no  amount  of  historical  significance   or   adaptability  to   a 


10  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

former  fashion  can  make  what  is  bad  poetry  in  the  present 
century  good  poetry  in  any  century  of  the  past. 

There  is  a  theory,  at  present  much  in  vogue,  by  which  the 
evolution  of  poetry  is  to  be  studied  everywhere  but  in  the 
individual  poet.  This  theory  has  been  summed  up  by  M. 
Remy  de  Gourmont  in  an  essay  on  one  of  its  chief  practi- 
tioners, Ferdinand  Brunetiere:  'Literary  history/  he  says,  'is 
no  longer  to  be  a  succession  of  portraits,  of  individual  lives; 
the  question  is  now  of  poetry  or  of  history,  not  of  poets  or  of 
historians;  works  are  to  be  studied,  without  too  much  import- 
ance being  given  to  their  writers,  and  we  are  to  be  shown 
how  these  works  give  birth  to  one  another  by  natural  neces- 
sity; how  from  the  species  poetry  are  born  the  varieties  sonnet 
and  madrigal ;  how,  under  the  influence  of  surroundings,  the 
lyrical  variety  is  transformed,  without  losing  its  essential 
characteristics,  into  eloquence,  with  many  further  metamor- 
phoses.' The  same  point  of  view  is  expressed  by  Mr.  Courthope 
when  he  tells  us  that  'it  is  unphilosophical  to  believe  that  a 
single  poet  can  turn  the  art  of  poetry  into  any  channel  he  will 
by  his  own  genius:  the  greatest  artists  are  those  who  best 
understood  the  conflict  of  tendencies  in  their  own  age,  and 
who,  though  they  rise  above  it  into  the  region  of  universal 
truth,  are  moved  by  it  to  reflect  in  their  work  its  particular 
form  and  character.'  In  other  words,  we  are  to  believe  that 
the  cart  drives  the  horse,  that  the  taste  of  the  time  makes  the 
genius  of  the  poet.  It  is  the  poet  who,  by  his  genius,  makes  the 
taste  of  the  time.  All  that '  conflicts  of  tendencies'  and  the  like 
have  to  do  with  the  poet  is  to  help  him  now  and  again  to  a 
convenient  form,  to  suggest  to  him  the  lute  or  the  stage,  to* 
give  him  this  or  that  malleable  lump  of  material.  He  is 
supremely  fortunate  if,  like  Shakespeare,  born  with  a  genius 
for  drama,  he  finds  a  stage  already  alive  and  awaiting  him; 
comparatively  unfortunate  if,  like  Goethe,  his  dramatic  genius, 
lacking  a  stage  for  its  complete  expression,  can  but  create 
individual  works,  which,  however  great,  lose  their  chance  of 


INTRODUCTION  11 

wholly  organic  development.  No  great  poet  ever  owed  any 
essential  part  of  his  genius  to  his  age ;  at  the  most  he  may  have 
owed  to  his  age  the  opportunity  of  an  easy  achievement. 

Take,  for  instance,  Chatterton.  Chatterton's  'masculine 
persuasive  force'  is  one  of  the  most  genuine  things  in  our 
literature,  and  is  in  no  degree  affected  by  the  mask  which  it 
pleased  him  to  put  on.  Chatterton  required  no  '  needs  of  the 
public  taste'  to  guide  him  into  a  'channel  of  great  poetical 
expression.'  He  found  for  himself  that '  channel  of  great  poet- 
ical expression' ;  he  found  accounts  in  black-letter  and  turned 
them  into  living  poetry,  and  it  has  been  made  a  crime  to  him 
that  he  was  an  alchemist  of  the  mind,  and  transmuted  base 
metal  into  gold.  It  was  his  whim  to  invent  a  language  for  the 
expression  of  the  better  part  of  himself,  a  language  which 
came  as  close  as  he  could  get  it  to  come  to  that  speech  of  the 
Middle  Ages  which  he  had  divined  in  Gothic  architecture  and 
in  the  crabbed  characters  of  old  parchments.  In  Chatterton 
the  whole  modern  romantic  movement  began,  consciously  and 
as  a  form  of  achieved  art ;  and  it  is  not  necessary  to  remember 
that  he  died  at  an  age  when  no  other  English  poet  had  done 
work  in  any  degree  comparable  with  his,  at  least  for  those 
qualities  of  imagination  typical  of  him,  in  order  to  give  him 
his  due  place  in  English  poetry.  The  existence  of  Chatterton, 
at  the  moment  when  he  happened  to  exist,  proves  as  conclus- 
ively as  need  be  that  the  man  of  genius  is  not  of  his  age,  but 
above  it. 

The  poet  who  typifies  for  us  the  eighteenth  century,  in 
which  Chatterton  was  an  exception,  is  Pope;  and  Pope  was 
not  a  poet  in  the  true  sense,  a  born  poet  who  had  the  misfor- 
tune to  be  modified  by  the  influence  of  the  age  into  which  he 
was  born,  but  a  writer  of  extraordinary  prose  capacity  and 
finish,  who,  if  he  had  lived  in  another  age  and  among  genuine 
poets,  would  have  had  no  more  than  a  place  apart,  admired 
for  the  unique  thing  which  he  could  do,  but  not  mistaken  for  a 
poet  of  true  lineage.  Pope's  poetic  sensibility  may  be  gauged 


12  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

by  a  single  emendation  which  he  made  in  the  text  of  his  edition 
of  Shakespeare.  Shakespeare  had  made  Antony  say  to  Cleo- 
patra, 'O  grave  charm!'  To  Pope  it  seemed  ridiculous  that  a 
light  woman  should  possess  gravity  in  charm.  He  proposed 
'gay,'  and  nature  seemed  to  be  reasserted:  '0  gay  charm!' 
what  more  probable  and  sufficient? 

The  poetry  of  the  eighteenth  century  has  no  fundamental 
relation  with  the  rest  of  English  poetry.  The  poets  of  every 
other  age  can  be  brought  together  under  a  single  conception: 
they  harmonise,  for  all  their  differences;  but  between  the 
poets  of  every  other  age  and  the  poets  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury there  is  a  gap,  impossible  to  pass  over.  Here  and  there, 
as  in  the  best  work  of  Collins,  we  can  distinguish  some  of  the 
eternal  signs  of  poetry.  But,  for  the  most  part,  the  gap  is  so 
palpable  that  we  find  critics  tacitly  acknowledging  it  by  their 
very  efforts  to  bridge  it  over,  and  asking  us,  with  Mr.  Court- 
hope,  in  speaking  of  Pope,  to  admit  'that  it  is  on  a  false  prin- 
ciple of  criticism  that  Warton,  and  those  who  think  with 
him,  blame  his  poetry  on  account  of  the  absence  of  qualities 
which  they  find  in  other  poets.'  If  those  qualities,  which  are 
to  be  found  in  other  poets  and  not  in  Pope,  are  precisely  the 
fundamental  qualities  which  constitute  poetry,  why  should 
these  qualities  be  quietly  laid  aside  for  the  occasion,  and,  the 
eighteenth  century  once  over,  taken  up  again  as  if  nothing 
had  happened? 

The  principles  of  poetry  are  eternal,  and  such  divine  ac- 
cidents as  Christopher  Smart  and  Thomas  Chatterton  in  an 
age  in  which  the  '  national  taste'  was  turned  persistently  from 
those  principles,  are  enough  to  show  that  no  pressure  of  con- 
temporary fashion  can  wholly  hinder  a  poet  from  speaking 
out  in  his  own  and  the  only  way.  In  the  Preface  to  his  '  Speci- 
mens of  Later  English  Poets'  Southey  had  the  frankness  to 
admit  that  'the  taste  of  the  public  may  better  be  estimated 
from  indifferent  poets  than  from  good  ones;  because  the 
former  write  for  their  contemporaries,  the  latter  for  poster- 


INTRODUCTION  13 

ity.-  And  he  asks,  naively  enough : '  Why  is  Pomfret  the  most 
popular  of  the  English  poets?  The  fact  is  certain,  and  the  solu- 
tion would  be  useful.'  Who  is  aware  to-day  of  the  existence 
of  a  poem  called  'The  Choice'  or  of  a  poet  called  Pomfret? 
Pomfret  held  his  own  for  a  hundred  years,  and  now  is  extinct. 
Enquiry  as  to  why  he  was  the  most  popular  of  the  English 
poets  is,  however  amusing  for  the  social  historian,  beside  the 
question  for  the  student  of  poetry.  What  matters  to  him  is  not 
that  'The  Choice'  was  once  considered  by  the  public  to  be  an 
incomparable  poem,  but  that  it  was  and  remains  a  tame  and 
mediocre  piece  of  verse,  never  really  rising  to  poetry,  and  that 
precisely  similar  material  could  be  and  had  been  lifted  into 
poetry  by  the  genius  of  a  genuine  poet,  such  as  Herrick. 

Again,  the  influence  of  one  poet  on  another  has  its  interest, 
its  importance  even ;  but  all  that  seriously  matters  is  that  part 
which  was  not  influenced,  the  poet  himself.  The  personal  con- 
tact of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  the  Elizabethan  reading  of 
Keats,  had  their  influence  on  the  form  and  sometimes  on  the 
very  impulse  to  existence  of  the  poetry  of  each  poet.  But 
it  was  of  the  nature  of  a  lucky  or  unlucky  accident;  it  was  at 
the  most  the  equivalent  of  some  natural  excitement,  a  sunset 
or  the  face  of  a  woman.  Nor  did  the  French  Revolution  create 
the  poetry  which  gave  it  expression  or  moralised  over  it» 
King  George  the  Third  inspired  the  genius  of  Byron,  but  only 
better  than  the  'dark  blue  ocean,'  because  comic  material  was 
more  valuable  to  Byron  than  heroic  or  sublime  material.  But 
that  Shelley  conceived  himself  to  be  atheist,  philanthropist, 
or  democrat ;  that  Keats  fell  in  love  with  Fanny  Brawne  and 
not  with  another  woman;  that  Coleridge  took  opium  and 
Wordsworth  lived  in  the  open  air  in  Cumberland :  these  things 
go  to  the  making  of  the  man  who  is  the  poet;  they  touch  or 
inspire  him,  in  what  is  deepest  or  most  sensitive  in  his  nature; 
and  though  they  will  never  explain  to  us  how  he  came  to  have 
the  power  of  creation,  they  will  explain  to  us  something  more 
than  his  method. 


14    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

To  distinguish  poetry,  then,  where  it  exists,  to  consider  it 
in  its  essence,  apart  from  the  accidents  of  the  age  in  which  it 
came  into  being,  to  define  its  qualities  in  itself;  that  is  the 
business  of  the  true  critic  or  student.  And  in  order  to  do  this 
he  must  cast  aside  all  theories  of  evolution  or  the  natural 
growth  of  genius,  and  remember  that  genius  is  always  an 
s  exception,  always  something  which  would  be  a  disease  if  it 
were  not  a  divine  gift.  He  must  clear  his  mind  of  all  limiting 
formulas,  whether  of  milieu,  Weltschmerz,  or  mode.  He  must 
disregard  all  schools  or  moyements  as  other  than  convenient 
and  interchangeable  labels.  He  must  seek,  in  short,  only 
poetry,  and  he  must  seek  poetry  in  the  poet,  and  nowhere  else. 

in 
The  quality  which  distinguishes  the  poetry  of  the  beginning 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  poetry  which  we  can  roughly 
group  together  as  the  romantic  movement,  is  the  quality  of 
its  imagination,  and  this  quality  is  seen  chiefly  as  a  kind  of 
atmosphere,  which  adds  strangeness  to  beauty.  What  is  it  in 
the  atmosphere  of  an  English  landscape  that  seems  at  once  to 
reveal  and,  in  a  sense,  to  explain  that  imaginative  atmosphere 
which  distinguishes  the  finest  English  poetry,  and,  in  a  special 
sense,  the  poetry  of  the  nineteenth  century,  from  almost  all 
the  fine  poetry  of  the  world?  I  was  walking  one  afternoon  along 
one  of  the  slopes  of  Hampstead  Heath,  just  above  the  Vale 
of  Health,  and  I  saw  close  beside  me  a  line  of  naked  autumn 
trees,  every  twig  brown  and  separate :  a  definite,  solid  thing, 
beautiful  in  structure,  sober  and  admirable  in  colour,  just  such 
branches  as  one  would  see  in  any  clear  country,  where  every- 
thing is  distinctly  visible,  in  Italy  or  in  Spain.  But,  at  some 
distance,  on  the  higher  edge  of  the  heath,  against  the  sky, 
there  was  another  line  of  naked  trees,  and  over  their  whole 
outline  there  was  a  soft,  not  quite  transparent,  veil  of  mist, 
like  the  down  on  fruit :  you  saw  them  and  the  general  lines 
of  their  structure,  but  you  saw  them  under  a  more  exquisite 


INTRODUCTION  15 

aspect,  like  an  image  seen  in  a  cloudy  mirror.  Nothing  that 
was  essential  in  their  reality  was  lost,  but  they  were  no  longer 
the  naked,  real  thing;  nature  had  transformed  them,  as  art 
transforms  nature.  So  imagination,  in  the  English  poets, 
transforms  the  bare  outlines  of  poetical  reality,  clothing  them 
with  an  atmosphere  which  is  the  actual  atmosphere  of  Eng- 
land. 

Is  there  in  Homer,  in  Dante,  in  the  poet  of  any  bright,  clear 
land,  where  men  and  things  are  seen  detached  against  the  sky, 
like  statues  or  architecture,  a  passage  like  that  passage  in 
Keats,  those  two  lines :  — 

'Charmed  magic  casements,  opening  on  the  foam 
Of  perilous  seas,  in  faery  lands  forlorn'  ? 

In  those  two  lines  we  get  the  equivalent  of  that  atmosphere 
which,  in  England,  adds  mystery  to  the  beauty  of  natural 
things.  The  English  sense  of  atmosphere,  this  imaginative 
transmutation  of  reality,  is  to  be  found  in  all  English  poetry 
from  the  beginning.  But  it  is  found  incidentally,  it  is  found 
subordinated  to  other  characteristics ;  it  is  the  rarest  but  not 
the  most  regarded  part  of  great  poetry.  The  best  poetry  of 
the  nineteenth  century  is  identical,  in  all  essential  respects, 
with  the  best  poetry  of  every  other  but  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury ;  it  is  strictly  in  the  tradition ;  but  there  is,  in  what  we  call 
the  romantic  movement,  a  certain  economy  which  we  do  not 
always  find  in  other  periods,  a  sense  of  the  limits  of  poetry,  of 
exactly  what  we  can  and  cannot  do.  No  one  has  ever  written 
more  lucidly  or  more  tenderly  than  Chaucer,  more  nobly  or 
more  musically  than  Spenser;  but  to  Chaucer  poetry  was 
exclusively  the  telling  of  a  story,  and  to  Spenser  it  was  partly 
picture-making  and  partly  allegory.  To  the  supreme  Eliza- 
bethan it  was  life,  every  action  of  the  will,  the  mind,  and  the 
soul ;  and  there  is  not  so  much  poetry  to  be  found  anywhere  in 
the  world,  but  it  is  more  often  than  not  in  scattered  splendours 
and  fragments  severally  alive.  The  'metaphysical'  poets  of 
the  seventeenth  century  brought  all  the  gifts  of  the  Magi,  and 


16  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

they  brought  pure  gold,  but  some  were  clouded  with  incense 
and  some  too  heavily  perfumed  with  myrrh.  Poetry  at  the 
beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century  wastes  surprisingly  little 
of  its  substance,  and  one  main  reason  of  this  is  that  it  realises, 
as  its  main  concern,  what  to  most  of  the  poets  of  the  past  had 
been,  though  their  existence  depended  upon  it,  but  lightly 
regarded,  —  that  imaginative  atmosphere  which  is  the  very 
breath  of  poetry,  and  adds  strangeness  to  beauty. 

Until  the  eighteenth  century  imagination,  if  not  always  a 
welcome  guest,  had  never  been  refused  admittance.  The  eight- 
eenth century  shut  the  door  on  imagination.  Before  that 
century  was  over  Pan  grew  uneasy  in  the  park,  and  impatient 
to  return  to  the  forest.  Thomson  and  Cowper  had  pushed 
open  the  gate  for  him  a  little  way,  but  by  no  means  let  him 
escape.  A  danger  signal  was  heard  but  not  heeded  when 
Christopher  Smart  cried  from  his  mad-house ;  the  cry  was  not 
repeated  till  Chatterton  really  awoke.  It  was  Dionysus  that 
awoke  in  Burns,  and  has  never  been  out  of  the  blood  of  any 
authentic  poet  since.  Burns  is  neither  eighteenth  nor  nine- 
teenth century,  neither  local  nor  temporary,  but  the  very 
flame  of  man,  speaking  as  a  man  has  only  spoken  once  or  twice 
in  the  world.  He  taught  no  one  anything  that  any  one  could 
learn,  but  this  ploughman  was  Apollo  to  Admetus,  incarnate 
song.  After  Burns,  though  no  one  could  sing  like  him,  no  one 
has  returned  to  the  delusion  that  the  poet  need  not  be  a  singer. 
Romance  rose  out  of  the  grave  of  Chatterton,  and  poetry,  after 
Burns,  was  no  longer  in  bondage  to  the  prose  and  rational 
mind.  Religion  woke  up  when  poetry  did,  and  liberty  seemed 
a  fantastically  delightful  thing.  Dilettantes  like  Leigh  Hunt 
joined  with  pedants  like  Southey  in  helping  to  set  poetry  free. 
Even  those  who,  like  Byron,  sided  theoretically  with  the 
formulas  of  the  past,  brought  in  a  new,  personal  manner  of 
their  own,  sometimes  upsetting  more  than  they  could  rebuild. 
One  after  another,  not  learning  of  each  other  any  more  than 
Wordsworth  learnt  of  Landor,  or  Shelley  of  Blake,  a  genera- 


INTRODUCTION  17 

tion  of  poets  rose  up,  akin  only  in  this,  that  they  had  returned 
instinctively  to  the  eternal  sources  of  poetry. 

Mr.  Watts-Dunton  has  used  a  phrase  which  has  become 
famous,  '  the  Renaissance  of  Wonder,'  for  that  '  great  revived 
movement  of  the  soul  of  man,  after  a  long  period  of  prosaic 
acceptance  in  all  things,  including  literature  and  art/  which 
can  be  roughly  indicated  as  the  romantic  movement.  As  a 
form  of  '  literary  shorthand'  it  has  its  value,  as  had  Matthew 
Arnold's  phrase, '  the  criticism  of  life.'  But  just  as  that  partial 
phrase  has  become  a  shibboleth  or  an  idol  of  the  market-place, 
so  is  this  summary  or  generalisation  in  danger  of  becoming 
one.  It  may  be  corrected  by  that  definition  of  Zoroaster  which 
Mr.  Watts-Dunton  himself  has  often  quoted : '  Poetry  is  appar- 
ent pictures  of  unapparent  realities.'  Now  the  important  thing 
is,  not  that  there  should  be  realities  which  are  unapparent, 
but  that  the  things  which  are  unapparent,  of  which  the  poet 
gives  apparent  pictures,  should  be  realities.  To  the  great 
imaginative  poet  they  are ;  and  that,  not  his  '  wonder'  at  them, 
is  what  matters.  There  is  much,  in  the  romantic  attitude,  of 
mere  wonder;  but  what  in  Cyril  Tourneur  remains  wonder, 
mere  angry  wonder,  becomes  in  Shakespeare  a  divine  cer- 
tainty. Imagination,  if  there  is  any  such  thing,  is  sight,  not 
wonder ;  a  thing  seen,  not  an  opening  of  the  eyes  to  see  it.  The 
great  poets,  the  great  visionaries,  have  always  seen  clearly; 
when  they  have  seen  furthest,  as  with  Dante  when  he  saw 
heaven  and  hell,  they  have  seen  without  wonder. 

What  is  really  meant  by  all  these  phrases,  and  by  the  name 
of  the  romantic  movement,  is  simply  the  reawakening  of  the 
imagination,  a  reawakening  to  a  sense  of  beauty  and  strange- 
ness in  natural  things,  and  in  all  the  impulses  of  the  mind  and 
the  senses.  That  reawakening  was  not  always  a  conscious  one. 
Thus  Crabbe  occupied  himself  in  keeping  out  imagination  as 
much  as  he  could,  yet  could  not  keep  out  nature,  It  was  at 
this  time  that  nature,  from  being  a  background,  came  forward 
and  seemed  likely  to  dwarf  the  human  figures  in  the  landscape. 


18  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Objects,  that  had  been  seen  detached,  without  atmosphere, 
were  seen  by  Wordsworth  in  pure  white  light ;  which  Keats 
caught  in  a  prism  of  his  own,  and  Shelley  turned  to  moon- 
light. Then,  lest  nature  should  have  undue  worship,  Byron 
set  himself  prominently  in  the  foreground.  Coleridge  is  fun- 
damentally both  naturalistic  and  romantic,  but  Shelley  is  not 
naturalistic  at  all,  in  any  but  a  romantic  sense.  What  all  these 
poets,  so  different  in  inspiration  and  tendency,  united  in  was 
in  an  aim  at  the  emancipation  of  the  world  and  of  the  mind 
and  of  the  vehicle  of  poetry  from  the  bondage  of  fact,  opinion, 
formality,  and  tradition;  and  when  fact,  opinion,  formality, 
and  tradition  go  out,  imagination  comes  in. 

-Wordsworth  has  been  looked  upon  as  the  leader,  as  Cole- 
ridge was  the  more  authentic  lawgiver,  of  this  emancipation. 
It  is  doubtful  if  Wordsworth  was  ever  consciously  under  any 
special  influence  among  his  predecessors.  Poetry  came  up  in 
him  naturally,  and  he  was  in  intellectual  revolt  against  what- 
ever was  not  sincere  in  the  substance  and  form  of  verse.  He" 
felt  first  and  thought  out  afterwards,  and  his  thoughts  came 
to  him  slowly,  often  deviatingly,  but  by  a  kind  of  spiritual 
necessity.  Thus  the  impulse  came  to  him  unconsciously  to  put 
off  the  misfitting  fashionable  clothes  of  the  period's  poetry, 
but  it  was  with  great  deliberation  that  he  put  them  off.  He 
knew,  by  instinctive  knowledge,  what  was  essential  in  poetry, 
and  that  essential  part  of  poetry  was  waiting  in  him  to  find 
fit  expression.  Coleridge,  with  his  rarer  literary  genius,  had 
been  awakened  by  the  gentle  hint  of  Bowles,  which  was  as  if 
some  one  had  touched  him  in  a  crowd,  and  he  had  turned  and 
seen  something  wonderful  passing.  But  while  these  men  were 
finding  out,  each  for  himself,  his  own  secret,  Landor  was  redis- 
covering Greece  not  less  privately,  and  Blake, '  his  talents  hav- 
ing been  wholly  devoted  to  the  attainment  of  excellence  in 
his  profession'  of  engraver,  was,  long  before  any  of  the  others 
and  in  deeper  obscurity,  inventing  a  new  magic  in  English 
speech. 


INTRODUCTION  19 

A  general  agreement  as  to  first  principles,  when  it  is  not  a 
vital  instinct,  is  apt  to  harden  into  formulas,  and  to  hinder  the 
free  action  of  the  mind.  But  in  this  revolt  against  the  doc- 
trinal and  analysing  principles  of  the  eighteenth  century,  in 
this  return  to  nature,  to  the  natural  part  of  man,  it  was  as  if  a 
new  Adam  had  returned  to  an  old  paradise.  Almost  nothing 
was  attempted,  except  by  a  few  experimental  and  not  really 
genuine  poets,  that  could  not  properly  be  done  in  verse;  no 
one,  after  Erasmus  Darwin,  wrote  a  '  Botanic  Garden.'  And 
scarcely  anything  that  could  be  done  in  verse  was  not  at- 
tempted. The  senses  have  never  been  served  more  purely  than 
by  Keats,  the  moral  instinct  more  severely  than  by  Words- 
worth, intellectual  beauty  more  ecstatically  than  by  Shelley. 
While  the  lyric  of  Shakespeare's  time  was  more  universally 
perfect,  a  purer  music,  can  we  say  that  the  age  of  Blake, 
Coleridge,  and  Shelley  was  inferior  to  that  age  in  actual  lyrical 
genius?  The  romantic  narrative  has  never  been  done  with 
more  magic  than  by  Keats,  nor  the  reflective  narrative  more 
justified  by  achievement  than  by  Wordsworth  in  '  The  Leech 
Gatherer.'  The  ballad  was  re-created  in  a  new  and  rarer  form 
by  Coleridge,  who,  with  Hogg,  brought  a  new  witchcraft  into 
poetry.  The  best  sonnets  of  the  period  are  among  the  best  of 
English  sonnets ;  and  if  any  one  has  ever  come  recognisably 
near  to  the  epic  since  'Paradise  Lost,'  it  is  Landor  in  'Gebir.' 
The  drama  is  the  form  of  poetry  which  was  attempted  least, 
and  only  once,  in  '  The  Cenci,'  with  success.  But  '  The 
Cenci'  is  the  greatest  play  since  Shakespeare. 

The  romantic  movement  is  an  emancipation,  and  it  cast  off, 
not  only  the  bandages  of  eighteenth-century  limitation,  but  all 
bonds  that  had  tightened  about  it  in  the  mere  acceptance 
of  tradition.  'Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty,'  is  a  saying  not 
personal  to  Keats  only.  It  was  what  Coleridge,  who  doubted 
everything  else,  never  doubted;  it  characterises  Wordsworth's 
poetry  whenever  it)  is  poetry  and  not  prose.  That  very  revolt 
against  'poetic  diction,'  which  seemed  like  a  turning  of  one's 


20      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH   POETRY 

back  on  the  speech  which  poetry  had  chosen  for  itself,  was 
really  for  the  purpose  of  getting  behind  that  speech.  The 
battle  in  all  ages  has  been  between  poetry  and  rhetoric,  and 
there  is  unconquered  rhetoric  enough  among  all  romantics. 
But  no  one  seriously  mistook  rhetoric  for  poetry,  as  many 
poets  in  many  ages  have  done.  Nature  was  accepted,  yet 
strangeness  was  sought  rather  than  refused,  that  salt  which 
gives  savour  to  life;  and  there  was  an  arduous  and  discreet 
cultivation  of  that  'continual  slight  novelty'  without  which 
poetry  cannot  go  on  in  any  satisfactory  way.  Imagination 
was  realised  as  being,  what  only  Blake  quite  clearly  said, 
reality;  and  the  beauty  of  imagination  the  natural  element  of 
that  which  it  glorifies.  Poetry  was  realised  as  a  personal  con- 
fession, or  as  an  evocation,  or  as  'an  instant  made  eternity.' 
It  was  realised  that  the  end  of  poetry  was  to  be  poetry ;  and 
that  no  story-telling  or  virtue  or  learning,  or  any  fine  purpose, 
could  make  amends  for  the  lack  of  that  one  necessity.  Thus 
it  may  be  affirmed  that  in  studying  this  period  we  are  able  to 
study  whatever  is  essential  in  English  poetry ;  that  is,  what- 
ever is  essential  in  poetry. 


THE   ROMANTIC   MOVEMENT   IN 
ENGLISH   POETRY 


JOHN  HOME   (1722-1808)  1 

John  Home  is  known  to  every  schoolboy  by  two  lines  in  the 
play  of  '  Douglas ' :  — 

'  My  name  is  Norval :  on  the  Grampian  Hills 
My  father  feeds  his  flocks;  a  frugal  swain.' 

They  occur  in  the  second  act,  and  are  said  in  answer  to  the 

request :  — 

Blush  not,  flower  of  modesty 
As  well  as  valour,  to  declare  thy  birth.' 

The  lines  are  typical  of  a  dramatist  who,  in  his  time,  made 
theatrical  successes  in  London  and  Edinburgh,  and,  by  some 
strange  delusion,  led  his  contemporaries  into  an  admiration 
which  seems  to  us  now  unmerited  and  unintelligible.  He 
shares  with  Joanna  Baillie  the  doubtful  honour  of  being  com- 
pared with  Shakespeare :  she  by  Scott  and  he  by  Burns. 


DR.  ERASMUS  DARWIN   (1731-1802) 2 

In  one  of  his  notes  to  '  The  Feast  of  the  Poets '  Leigh  Hunt 
gays:  'The  late  Dr.  Darwin,  whose  notion  of  poetical  music, 
in  common  with  that  of  Goldsmith  and  others,  was  of  the 
school  of  Pope,  though  his  taste  was  otherwise  different, 
was  perhaps  the  first  who,  by  carrying  it  to  its  extreme  pitch 
of  sameness,  and  ringing  it  affectedly  in  one's  ears,  gave  the 
public  at  large  a  suspicion  that  there  was  something  wrong 

1  (1)  Douglas,  1757.  (2)  Agis,  Douglas,  The  Siege  of  Aquileia,  1760. 
(3)  Collected  Works,  3  vols.  1822. 

2  (1)  The  Loves  of  the  Plants,  1789.  (2)  The  Economy  of  Vegetation, 
1792  (the  two  parts  of  The  Botanic  Garden).  (3)  The  Temple  of  Nature, 
1803.  (4)  Poetical  Works,  1807. 


24   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

in  its  nature.'  No  more  deliberate  endeavour  of  a  prose  mind 
to  produce  poetry  of  a  formally  accomplished  kind  has  been 
seen  than  that  of  Dr.  Darwin  in  his  'Botanic  Garden/  who 
tells  us  that  'the  general  design  of  the  following  sheets  is  to 
enlist  Imagination  under  the  banner  of  Science.'  In  a  prose 
'interlude '  to  the  second  part  of  the  poem,  'The  Loves  of  the 
Plants '  (in  which  he  professes  to  contend  with  Ovid,  and  meta- 
morphose '  by  similar  art '  his  trees  and  flowers,  '  after  having 
remained  prisoners  so  long  in  their  respective  vegetable  man- 
sions,' back  into  men  and  women),  he  gives  us  his  theory  of 
poetry,  which  is  so  identical  with  his  practice  that  we  cannot 
doubt  of  his  satisfaction  with  his  own  work  as  a  poet.  '  The 
Muses  are  young  Ladies,'  he  tells  us ;  'we  expect  to  see  them 
dressed;  though  not  like  some  modern  beauties,  with  so 
much  gauze  and  feather,  that  "  the  Lady  herself  is  the  least 
part  of  her.".  But  art  is  not  to  confine  itself  to  nature:  'the 
further  the  artist  recedes  from  nature,  the  greater  novelty  he 
is  likely  to  produce.'  The  poet,  it  appears,  'writes  principally 
to  the  eye ' ;  and  to  prove  his  principle  Darwin  gives  this 
instance:  'Mr.  Pope  has  written  a  bad  verse  in  the  "  Windsor 
Forest'?:  — 

"  And  Kennet  swift  for  silver  eels  renowned.' 

The  word  renowned  does  not  present  the  idea  of  a  visible  ob- 
ject to  the  mind,  and  is  thence  prosaic.  But  change  the  line 
thus : — 

"And  Kennet  swift,  where  silver  graylings  play," 

and  it  becomes  poetry,  because  the  scenery  is  then  brought 
before  the  eye.' 

So  easy,  and  so  plain  a  matter  of  rule,  did  it  seem  to  the 
scientific  poet  to  convert  prose  into  poetry.  Turn  from  the 
sections  in  his  'argument,'  as  for  instance  'Pumps  explained 
—  Charities  of  Miss  Jones  —  Departure  of  the  Nymphs  like 
water  spiders,'  to  the  statements  in  verse,  and  it  will  be  seen 
that  he  is  always  striving  to  trace  the  passage  of  light  over 


DR.   ERASMUS  DARWIN  25 

an  object,  which  is  his  only  notion  of  the  property  of  imagina- 
tion illuminating  science.  Thus,  treating  of  electricity,  he 
bids  his  nymphs 

'  Beard  the  bright  cylinder  with  golden  wire, 
And  circumfuse  the  gravitating  fire  '; 

while  in  a  statue  of  Lotta  (or  Lot's  wife)  in  the  salt-mines  of 
Cracow  he  observes  how 

'  Cold  dews  condense  upon  her  pearly  breast, 
And  the  big  tear  rolls  lucid  down  her  vest.' 

Elsewhere 

'  His  cubic  forms  phosphoric  Fluor  prints,' 

and  some  unpleasant  personification  is  seen  with 

'  The  maudlin  tear-drop  glittering  in  her  eyes.' 

This  steady  mechanical  glitter  is  I  suppose  what  Hayley 
meant  when  he  praised  the  '  radiant  lays '  of  one  whom  he 
united  with  Cowper  in  praising.  Of  this  praise  he  declared :  — 

'Time  verifies  it  daily; 
Trust  it,  dear  Darwin,  on  the  word 
Of  Cowper  and  of  Hayley.' 

But  the  '  Anti-Jacobin  I  was  to  come  with  its  '  Loves  of  the 
Triangles,'  text  and  notes  inextricably  moulded  upon  the 
text  and  notes  of  Darwin  ;  and  the  reader  of  to-day  is  puzzled 
to  know  whether  he  is  reading  the  original  or  the  parody 
as  he  turns  from 


to 


'  Soft  Sighs  responsive  whisper  to  the  chords, 
And  Indignations  half  unsheath  their  swords, 


'  The  obedient  Pulley  strong  Mechanics  ply, 
And  wanton  Optics  roll  the  melting  eye.' 


26    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


JAMES  BEATTIE   (1735-1803) x 

Does  any  one  ever  open  'The  Minstrel'  of  Beattie?   In  the 

preface  to  a  little  old  undated  copy,  printed  at  Alnwick  and 

decorated  with  quaint  engravings,  I  find  that  in  the  opening 

lines  of  that  poem  it  seemed  to  the  editor  that  'every  point 

that   imagination   can   conceive,   constituting  excellence  in 

poetical  composition,  is  there  displayed  in  its  fullest  extent.' 

Beattie  was  more  modest,  and,  in  addressing  what  he  called 

his  '  Gothic  lyre,'  he  declares : '  I  only  wish  to  please  the  simple 

mind.'   His  moralisings  seem  now  a  little  out  of  date,  yet  it 

is  still  amusing  to  read :  — 

'  Blest  be  the  day  I  'scaped  the  wrangling  crew, 
From  Pyrrho's  maze,  and  Epicurus'  stye,' 

and  to  be  reminded  that  these  '  pointed  lines '  refer  to  Hume 

and  his  disciples,  with  whom  the  Gothic  bard  had  had  a  famous 

controversy.    Remembering  that  he  was  fond  of  music,  and 

that  he  '  disliked  his  own  favourite  violoncello '  after  the  death 

of  his  son,  whom  he  used  to  accompany  while  he  sang,  we  can 

still  find  a  personal  note  in  a  stanza  which  is  in  every  way 

characteristic  of  his  style*.  — 

'Is  there  a  heart  that  music  cannot  melt? 
Alas !  how  is  that  rugged  heart  forlorn ! 
Is  there,  who  ne'er  those  mystic  transports  felt 
Of  solitude  and  melancholy  born? 
He  needs  not  woo  the  Muse;  he  is  her  scorn. 
The  sophist's  rope  of  cobweb  he  shall  twine ; 
Mope  o'er  the  schoolman's  peevish  page;  or  mourn 
And  delve  for  life  in  Mammon's  dirty  mine; 
Sneak  with  the  scoundrel  fox,  or  grunt  with  glutton  swine.' 

Little  village  pictures,  though  of  the  cataloguing  kind,  have 
their  fresh  detail,  where 

'Crown'd  with  her  pail  the  tripping  milk-maid  sings,' 

1  (1)  Original  Poems  and  Translations,  1761.  (2)  The  Judgement  of 
Paris,  1765.  (3)  Verses  on  the  Death  of  Churchill,  1765.  (4)  Poems  on 
Several  Subjects,  1766.  (5)  The  Minstrel,  1771.  (6)  Poems  on  Several 
Occasions,  1776.    (7)  Poetical  Works,  Aldine  Edition,  1830. 


JOHN  WOLCOT  27 

and  some  of  the  descriptions  of  what  seemed  to  him  the  best 
poetical  materials  in  nature,  — 

'Rocks,  torrents,  gulfs,  and  shapes  of  giant  size, 
And  glittering  cliffs  on  cliffs,' 

or  some  'vale  romantic/  or  some  mountain  from  whose  'easy- 
swell  !  might  be  seen 

'  Blue  hills,  and  glittering  waves,  and  skies  in  gold  arrayed/ 

still  retain  some  faint  glow  of  the  enthusiasm  that  gave  them 
their  momentary  existence.  It  is  best  not  to  go  beyond  the 
pages  containing  '  The  Minstrel,'  or  we  may  come  on  epithets 
as  innocently  startling,  in  the  eighteenth-century  manner,  as 
this,  of '  the  oblivious  lap  of  soft  Desire.' 


JOHN  WOLCOT   (1738-1819) 

The  vulgarity  of  the  Englishman  when  he  fights  has  never 
been  seen  so  shamelessly  in  verse  as  in  the  voluminous  rhymed 
verse  of  Peter  Pindar.  These  rabid  impromptus  spare  neither 
the  living  nor  the  dead,  in  their 

'  desultory  way  of  writing, 
A  hop  and  step  and  jump  way  of  inditing,' 

in  which  there  is  sometimes  a  coal-heaver's  vigour  of  speech, 
as 

'  Once  more  forth  volcanic  Peter  flames.' 

He  is  himself  his  own  best  characteriser,  and  bids  himself, 
though  to  no  avail,  — 

'  Envy  not  such  as  have  in  dirt  surpassed  ye ; 
'T  is  very,  very  easy  to  be  nasty.' 

Nor  does  he  take  the  advice  which  he  gives,  when  he  says :  — 

'Build  not,  alas!  your  popularity 
On  that  beast's  back  ycleped  Vulgarity.' 


28  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Such  popularity  as  he  got  in  his  time  was  built  on  the  back 
of  just  such  a  'little  old  black  beast.'  'The  leading  feature 
seems  to  be  impudence/  he  says  of  one  of  his  own  versicles, 
and  declares  rightly  that  another  'is  verily  exceeded  by 
nothing  in  the  annals  of  impertinence.'  His  jokes,  which  be- 
slime  most  of  the  pages,  are  hardly  ever  funny,  even  when 
they  are  grossest;  nor  is  there  even  fun  in  the  attempts  at 
serious  sentiment  which  are  strangely  interlarded  here  and 
there.  A  bunch  of  '  New-Old  Ballads/  done,  we  are  told,  '  as 
innocent  deceptions/  seem  not  less  out  of  place  among  the 
slatternly  '  odes '  which  do  not  even  imitate  good  models,  but 
are  content  to  be  personal  at  the  expense  of  every  quality 
which  could  give  them  merit.  Gifford  has  been  blamed  for 
outdoing  Wolcot's  defamatory  and  disreputable  filth  in  an 
'  Ode  to  Peter  Pindar/  which  is  not  pleasant  reading.  But 
no  punishment  could  be  too  humiliating  for  one  whose  dog- 
gerel is  worse  than  anything  left  by  the  lowest  brawlers  of 
the  Elizabethan  age;  for  these  were  poets  stooping  to  wield 
muckrakes,  and  this  the  stye's  natural  guardian. 


WILLIAM  COMBE   (1741-1823) » 

William  Combe  is  still  remembered  as  'Dr.  Syntax/  but 
it  is  because  of  Rowlandson's  coloured  etchings,  for  which 
the  verses  were  written,  rather  than  for  any  tolerable  qualities 

1  (1)  The  Diaboliad,  1776.  (2)  Additions  to  the  Diaboliad,  1777.  (3)  The 
Diabolo-Lady ;  or,  a  Match  in  Hell,  1777.  (4)  Anti-Diabolo-Lady,  1777.  (5) 
The  First  of  April ;  or,  The  Triumph  of  Folly,  1777.   (6)  A  Dialogue  in  the 

Shades,  1777.   (7)  Heroic  Epistle  to  a  Noble  D ,  1777.   (8)  A  Poetical 

Epistle  to  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds,  1777.  (9)  A  Letter  to  her  Grace  the  Duchess 
of  Devonshire,  1777.  (10)  A  Second  Letter  to  the  Duchess  of  Devonshire, 
1777.  (11)  The  Duchess  of  Devonshire's  Cow,  a  Poem,  1777.  (12)  An 
Heroic  Epistle  to  the  'Noble  Author'  of  'The  Duchess  of  Devonshire's 
Cow,'  1777.  (13)  The  Royal  Register;  or,  Observations  on  the  Principal 
Characters  of  the  Church,  State,  Court,  etc.,  1777-84.  (14)  Perfection;  a 
Poetical  Epistle,  1778.  (15)  The  Diaboliad,  Part  II,  1778.  (16)  The 
Justification,  1778.    (17)  The  Auction;  a  Town  Eclogue,  1778.    (18)  An 


WILLIAM  COMBE  29 

in  the  jogging  couplets,  tamely  trying  to  be  burlesque,  with 
their  broken  and  irrelevant  narrative.  The  writer  modestly 
enough  explains  that  when  the  first  print  came  to  him  he 
did  not  know  what  would  be  the  subject  of  the  second.  Row- 
landson's  designs  require  no  comment;  the  line  and  colour 
have  the  beauty  of  the  finest  burlesque,  and  they  live  a  rollick- 
ing life  of  their  own.  Combe  ambles  after  them  with  a  halting 
gait,  prosing  and  moralising.  He  supposed  that  he  was  imi- 
tating Butler  in  'Hudibras.'  Of  the  eighty-six  publications 
which  have  been  identified  as  his  work,  none  were  published 
under  his  name.  His  satires  however,  such  as  the  '  Diaboliad  ' 
series,  seem  to  have  been  undisguised  in  their  application. 
In  his  dedication  to  the  latter  he  said,  needlessly,  that  he 
was  a  careless  writer.  'I  was  not  born,'  he  explains,  'to  refine 
and  polish  my  own  compositions.  The  long  habit  of  making 
rapid  sketches  of  men  and  things  has  rendered  me  wholly 
incapable  of  filling  up  an  outline  with  those  effectual  masses 
of  light  and  shade,  and  that  happy,  harmonising  mixture  of 
colours,  which  distinguished  the  work  of  judicious  applica- 
tion.' 'The  Diaboliad'  and  its  successors  plaster  crude  daubs 
clumsily  on  unprepared  canvases.  Dashes,  whole  lines  of 
asterisks,  pretend  to  conceal  meanings  too  definite  to  be  writ- 
ten. What  is  written  is  never  of  any  better  quality  than  such 
a  couplet  as  this :  — 

'  With  these  supports,  the  modest  Peer  preferr'd 
His  claim,  which  Satan  with  attention  hears.' 

Interesting  Letter  to  the  Duchess  of  Devonshire,  1778.  (19)  An  Heroic 
Epistle  to  Sir  James  Wright,  1778.  (20)  An  Heroic  Epistle  to  an  Unfor- 
tunate Monarch,  1778.  (21)  The  Philosopher  in  Bristol,  1778.  (22)  The 
World  as  it  goes,  1779.    (23)  The  Fast  Day;  a  Lambeth  Eclogue,  1780. 

(24)  The  Traitor,  a  Poem,  1781.   (25)   The  Royal  Dream ;  or,  tlie  P in 

a  Panic,  an  Eclogue,  1791.  (26)  Carmen  Seculare,  1796.  (27)  Clifton, 
a  Poem,  in  imitation  of  Spenser,  1803.  (28)  The  Tour  of  Dr.  Syntax  in 
Search  of  the  Picturesque,  1812.  (29)  Six  Poems,  1813.  (30)  Poetical 
Sketches  of  Scarborough,  1813.  (31)  The  English  Dance  of  Death,  2  vols. 
1815-16.  (32)  The  Dance  of  Life,  1816.  (33)  The  Second  Tour  of  Dr. 
Syntax,  1820.  (34)  The  Third  Tour  of  Dr.  Syntax  in  search  of  a  wife, 
1821.   (35)  Johnny  Quae  Genus ;  or,  the  Little  Foundling,  1822. 


30  ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

The  aim  of  his  'Diabolo-Lady'  he  assures  us  was' to  'damn 
Women  to  everlasting  fame.'  But  his  libels  and  his  feeble 
evidences  are  happily  forgotten. 


ANNA  L^TITIA  BARBAULD  (1743-1825)  » 

Anna  L^titia  Barbauld  was  a  writer  of  great  diligence, 
who  had  the  good  luck  to  concentrate  her  various  talents 
into  a  single  poem,  which  has  been  universally  appreciated. 
The  last  lines,  beginning  'Life!  we  !ve  been  long  together,' 
are  not  less  than  an  inspiration,  a  woman's,  in  which  sadness, 
tenderness,  and  hope  are  mingled. 


HANNAH  MORE   (1745-1833) 2 

Hannah  More  was  a  copious  writer  of  prose  and  verse. 
Her  plays  were  acted  by  Garrick,  her  story  of  'Ccelebs  in 
Search  of  a  Wife'  has  come  down  almost  to  our  generation, 
ana  in  her  own  time  she  was  praised  by  Johnson  and  popu- 
lar with  the  general  and  later  in  life  with  the  pious  public. 
I  have  a  copy  before  me  of  the  'Sacred  Dramas;  chiefly  in- 
tended for  Young  Persons,'  and  'calculated,'  we  are  told  in 
the  introductory  memoir,  '  to  repress  the  luxuriance  of  juve- 
nile imaginations,'  a  lamentable  task  which  worse  books  and 
less  intelligent  women  have  undertaken.  The  little  plays, 
'the  subjects  taken  from  the  Bible'  with  considerable  skill 
and  discretion,  are  still  readable,  on  a  dull  afternoon,  and 
though  they  are  scarcely  in  the  proper  sense  dramatic,  it  is 

1  (1)  Poems,  1773.  (2)  Poem,  with  Poetical  Epistle  to  William  Wilber- 
force,  1792.    (3)  Eighteen  Hundred  and  Eleven,  1811.    (4)  Works,  1825. 

2  (1)  The  Inflexible  Captive,  1774.  (2)  Sir  Edred  of  the  Bower,  and 
the  Bleeding  Rock,  1776.  (3)  Percy,  1777.  (4)  The  Fatal  Falsehood, 
1779.  (5)  Sacred  Dramas,  1782.  (6)  Slavery,  1788.  (7)  The  Feast  of 
Freedom,  1827.    (8)  Collected  Poems,  1816  and  1829. 


HANNAH   MORE  31 

evident  that  the  author  has  studied  the  methods  of  'the 
excellent  Racine/  and  has  realised  '  the  perfection  of  his  dra- 
matic art.'   There  are  perhaps  too  many  in  view  of 

'  The  ostentatious  virtues  which  still  press 
For  notice  and  for  praise,' 

as  she  says  of  them,  in  rebuke  and  without  self-knowledge. 
But  it  seemed  to  her  that  the  Muse,  in  her  time,  had  drunk 
deep  of  some  'delicious  ruin,'  as  she  says  with  a  curiously 
modern  choice  of  epithet,  and  she  prays 

'  for  some  balm 
Of  sovereign  power,  to  raise  the  drooping  Muse 
To  all  the  health  of  Virtue.' 

The  Muse,  quieted  by  her  balm,  sinks  into  a  state  of  very 
even  health  throughout  these  tiny  plays,  better  fitted,  as  she 
is  aware,  for  the  nursery  than  for  the  stage.  Her  footnote, 
touching  the  question,  shows  foresight  and  is  a  permanent 
lesson.  '  It  would  not  be  easy/  she  says,  '  nor  perhaps  proper, 
to  introduce  sacred  tragedies  on  the  English  stage.  The  pious 
would  think  it  profane,  while  the  profane  would  think  it  dull.' 
It  is  for  the  supposed  dulness  that  the  name  of  Hannah  More 
is  mockingly,  but  unjustly,  perpetuated.  She  gives  one  of 
her  Bible  kings  this  expressive  line :  — 

'  That  world,  whose  gaze  makes  half  the  charm  of  greatness  ' ; 

and  we  discover,  in  another  play,  a  princess  thanking  her  gods 
that  they  have  made  mercy  a  '  keen  rapture  exquisite/  before 
they  imposed  it  on  the  virtuous  as  a  duty.  There  can  be  no 
dulness  where  so  alert  a  psychology  is  discernible  between  the 
sober  lines,  which  are  scarcely,  all  the  same,  as  Johnson  said 
of  them,  the  production  of  'the  most  powerful  versificatrix 
in  the  English  language.' 


32    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


WILLIAM  HAYLEY   (1745-1820) * 

Hayley  is  known  to  us  now  chiefly  as  a  good  but  unsatisfac- 
tory friend  to  Blake,  and  for  the  amusing  title  of  his  'Tri- 
umphs of  Temper.'  In  his  time  he  had  a  serious  reputation, 
which  he  took  with  great  solemnity.  In  the  very  personal 
preface  to  his  '  Triumphs '  he  expresses  the  '  kind  of  duty  in- 
cumbent on  those  who  devote  themselves  to  Poetry,  to  raise, 
if  possible,  the  dignity  of  declining  Art.'  '  I  wished  indeed  (but 
I  fear  most  ineffectually),'  he  adds,  'for  powers  to  unite  some 
touches  of  the  sportive  wildness  of  Ariosto,  and  the  more 
serious  sublime  painting  of  Dante,  with  some  portions  of  the 
enchanting  elegance,  the  refined  imagination,  and  the  moral 
grace  of  Pope;  and  to  do  this,  if  possible,  without  violating 
those  rules  of  propriety  which'  did  not  exclude  'familiar  In- 
cident and  allegorical  picture  from  affording  a  strong  relief  to 
each  other.'  What  Mr.  Hayley  could  do  in  the  direction  of 
the  'serious  sublime'  of  Dante  may  be  seen  in  a  translation 
of  six  lines  of  the  'Inferno.'  Only  the  first  need  be  quoted: 
'Through  me  ye  pass  to  Spleen's  terrific  dome.'  But  if  we 
turn  to  his  opinion  of  'daring  Dante,'  we  shall  be  surprised  to 
understand  his  reason  for  wishing  to  share  'some  touches/ 
of  one  who  united  '  The  Seraph's  Music  and  the  Demon's 
yell.'  The  definition  is  unique  of  its  kind.  Ariosto's  'sport- 
ive wildness'  may  perhaps  be  meant  to  appear  where  the 

1  (1)  A  Poetical  Epistle  on  Marriage,  1775.  (2)  An  Ode  to  Cheerfulness, 
1775.  (3)  An  Epistle  to  Dr.  Long,  1777.  (4)  Epistle  on  Painting,  1777. 
(5)  Poetical  Epistle  to  Admiral  Keppel,  1779.  (6)  An  Elegy  on  the  An- 
cient Greek  Model,  1779.  (7)  Epistle  on  History,  1780.  (8)  Ode  to 
Howard,  1780.  (9)  Epistle  to  a  Friend,  1780.  (10)  The  Triumphs  of 
Temper,  1781.  (11)  Poetical  Epistles  on  Epic  Poetry,  1782.  (12)  Plays 
of  Three  Acts  and  in  Verse,  1784.  (13)  Poetical  Works,  3  vols.  1785. 
(14)  The  Happy  Prescription,  1785.  (15)  The  Two  Connoisseurs,  1785. 
(16)  Occasional  Stanzas,  1788.  (17)  The  Young  Widow,  1789.  (18)  An 
Elegy  on  the  Death  of  Sir  K.  Jones,  1795.  (19)  An  Essay  on  Sculpture, 
1800.  (20)  Triumphs  of  Music,  1804.  (21)  Ballads  founded  on  Anec- 
dotes of  Animals,  1805.   (22)  Three  Plays  with  a  Preface,  1811. 


WILLIAM   HAYLEY  33 

'cheerful  banquet'  underground  at  which  very  unpleasant 
persons  sit  down  to  'rich  liqueurs '  is  presented  to  the  shocked 
heroine.  Pope  may  be  responsible  for  'The  spleenful  out- 
rage of  the  angry  peer/  or  perhaps  when 

'  The  light  Serena  to  the  window  springs, 
On  curiosity's  amusive  wings.' 

But  where  the  attempt  to  'raise,  if  possible,  the  dignity  of 
a  declining  Art'  is  to  be  found  in  this  mixture  of  'familiar 
Incident  and  allegorical  picture/  is  beyond  research. 

Hayley  tells  us  that  he  has  given  'an  air  of  novelty'  to 
his  'Triumphs,'  and  he  introduces  his  three  plays  in  would- 
be  comic  verse  with  the  hope  that  his  '  liberal  and  enlightened 
readers  will  look  with  indulgence  on  a  publication,  which 
arose  from  his  wish  to  introduce  a  striking,  and  he  trusted, 
not  a  blameless  variety  into  the  amusements  of  English  liter- 
ature.' The  novelty  of  Hayley 's  humour  must,  one  imagines, 
have  had  something  to  do  with  some  of  Blake's  best  epigrams. 
Odes  and  Epistles,  Essays  in  Verse,  Sonnets,  Songs,  and  oc- 
casional Verses,  follow  one  another  with  dreary  persistence, 
interspersed  with  notes  longer  than  the  poems,  but  better 
reading,  and  more  nearly  coming  within  the  limits  of  that 
indulgence  which  he  once  claimed  for  'those  pleasing  and 
innocent  delusions  in  which  a  poetical  Enthusiast  may  be 
safely  indulged.' 

Hayley  was  a  poetical  enthusiast,  but  remembering  with 

Blake  — 

4  the  verses  that  Hayley  sung 
When  my  heart  knocked  against  the  roof  of  my  tongue,' 

we  must  conclude  that  it  was  not  safe  to  indulge  him  in  his 
innocent  delusions.  No  one  has  the  right  to  bore  the  world, 
or  one  great  poet,  with  as  little  excuse  as  Hayley.  He  was  a 
rich  man,  and,  in  the  days  of  patrons,  the  prodigal  patron  of 
his  own  ineptitudes. 


34     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


CHARLES  DIBDIN   (1745-1814)  * 

Dibdin  left  an  immense  quantity  of  singable  songs,  not  only 
ballads  of  the  sea,  but  vigorous,  often  vulgar,  not  seldom 
amusing  songs  on  all  kinds  of  subjects,  reminding  one  at  times 
of  George  Morland's  pictures.  It  is  by  '  Tom  Bowling '  that 
Dibdin  is  best  known,  and  there  is  a  good  swing  in  it  and  some 
ingenious  punning.  It  is  a  little  self-conscious  in  its  attempt  to 
render  a  seaman's  speech,  and  is  only  quite  plausible  from  that 
point  of  view  here  and  there.  This  way  of  song-writing,  the 
building  up,  the  final  clench  at  the  end,  the  actual  rhythm, 
seem  to  anticipate  some  of  the  later  characteristics  of  Mr. 
Albert  Chevalier's  cockney  ballads.  Dibdin  had  an  illegiti- 
mate son,  Thomas  John  (1771-1841),  who  was  an  actor  and 
writer  of  comic  plays  and  songs. 


JOHN  O'KEEFFE   (1747-1833) 2 

John  O'Keeffe  was  a  copious  and  outrageous  maker  of 
comic  plays,  operas,  and  farces,  of  which  it  may  well  be 
said,  in  his  own  words  in  the  refrain  of  one  of  his  own  songs, 
'All  is  puff,  rattle,  squeak,  and  ding-dong.'  He  also  wrote 
poems,  which  he  left  as  a  legacy  to  his  daughter,  and  they  are 
printed  with  all  his  own  naive  comments  on  them.  Of  'Bona 
the  Rake;  or, The  Terrible  Bony! '  (Bona  being  Bonaparte)  he 
says:  'This  poem  was  with  the  exception  of  "War  and  Peace  " 
(which  he  invariably  called  his  Sublime  Pedestal  of  Fame), 
decidedly  the  author's  favourite  of  all  his  productions.'  He 
began  it,  he  says,  as  a  song,  and  it  comes  finally  to  be  eighty 
pages  in  this  manner :  — 

1  Professional  Life,  containing  600  songs,  4  vols.  1803. 

2  (1)  Dramatic  Works,  4  vols.  1798.  (2)  O'Keeffe's  Legacy  to  his 
Daughter,  being  the  Poetical  Works  of  the  late  John  O'Keeffe,  Esq., 
the  Dramatic  Author,  1834. 


JOHN   O'KEEFFE  35 

'Great  Constantine  Christian-Imperial  Premier, 
Imperial  Napoleon  now  eagles  it  there.' 

But  his  most  amusing  and  in  every  way  best  verse  is  to  be 
found  scattered  all  over  the  interminable  pages  of  his  plays. 
The  prose  is  not  less  swift  and  toppling  than  the  verse,  as  in 
this  sentence  from '  Tony  Lumpkin  in  Town ' : '  He  gaped  at  the 
masks,  roared  most  stertorously  discordant  with  the  music, 
overset  the  pyramids,  pocketed  the  sweetmeats,  broke  the 
glasses,  made  love  to  an  Arcadian  dairy-maid,  tripped  up  the 
heels  of  a  harlequin,  beat  a  hermit,  who  happened  to  be  a 
captain  of  the  guards,  and  gave  a  bishop  a  black  eye.'  Some- 
times his  verse,  for  a  moment,  turns  serious,  as  in  the  song 
which  begins :  — 

'  Beauty  in  the  street  is  sold, 
And  envy  spatters  fame  with  dirt, 
And  honour 's  now  despised  and  old, 
And  genius  sports  a  ragged  shirt.' 

And  one  of  his  metres  anticipates  a  metre  used  afterwards  by 
Darley  and  later  still  by  Meredith,  where  it  comes  to  perfec- 
tion :  — 

'Fly,  fly,  refreshing  gales,  ah  gently  by  me, 
In  passing  softly  whisper  who  is  come  ; 
No  news  of  him  I  love,  oh  ne'er  come  nigh  me  — 
Sing,  sing,  ye  pretty  birds,  his  welcome  home.' 

Refrains  of  preposterous  oddity,  not  outdone  till  the  time  of 
Marzials'  unforgettable 

'Plop,  plop, 
The  barges  flop 
Drip  drop,' 

are  to  be  found  in  the  '  amateur  high  musical '  manner  of 


'  Bounce ! 
Flounce  1 ' 


And  better  tunes  too,  as  in 


'  Hey  down, 
Ho  down, 
Derry  derry  down, 
All  amongst  the  leaves  so  green-O. 


36      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

This  boisterousness  sinks  at  times  to  vulgarity,  but  of  a  wild, 
hearty  sort,  and  is  rarely  without  a  real  mastery  of  comic 
metre.  O'Keeffe's  most  perfect  extravagance,  his  rhythm  at 
its  best,  is  to  be  found  in  this  splendid  tune,  which  Leigh  Hunt 
vainly  tried  to  copy:  — 

'Amo,  amas, 
I  love  a  lass, 

As  cedar  tall  and  slender; 
Sweet  cowslip's  face 
Is  her  nominative  case, 
And  she  's  of  the  feminine  gender. 
Horum  quorum, 
Sunt  divorum, 
Harum,  scarum,  Divo; 
Tag  rag,  merry  derry,  periwig  and  hatband, 
Hie,  hoc,  harum,  genitivo.' 

There,  if  you  like,  is  nonsense;  but  how  convincing  to  the 
ear! 


JOHN  PHILPOT  CURRAN    (1750-1817)  « 

Curran,  a  man  of  wit  and  a  great  speaker,  of  whom  Byron 
said  '  I  have  heard  that  man  speak  more  poetry  than  I  have 
ever  seen  written/  wrote  one  poem  and  one  only  which  is 
worth  remembering.  It  is  in  one  of  the  good  old  Irish  stanzas 
which  Dr.  Hyde  has  made  familiar  and  beautiful  to  us,  and  it 
has  a  kind  of  laughter  heard  through  a  cry,  an  audacity  in  the 
face  of  death,  which,  in  a  '  Deserter's  Meditation/  anticipates 
the  great  gallows-song  of  Burns.  Here  are  the  two  stanzas :  — 

'  If  sadly  thinking,  with  spirits  sinking, 
Could  more  than  drinking  my  cares  compose, 
A  cure  for  sorrow  from  sighs  I'd  borrow, 
And  hope  to-morrow  would  end  my  days. 
But  as  in  wailing  there 's  nought  availing, 
And  Death  unfailing  will  strike  the  blow, 
Then  for  that  reason,  and  for  a  season, 
Let  us  be  merry  before  we  go. 

1  The  Life  of  the  Right  Honourable  John  Philpot  Curran.   By  his  son, 
William  Henry  Curran.   2  vols.  1822. 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  37 

'To  joy  a  stranger,  a  way-worn  ranger, 
In  every  danger  rny  course  I've  run; 
Now  hope  all  ending,  and  Death  befriending, 
His  last  aid  lending,  my  cares  are  done. 
No  more  a  rover,  a  hapless  lover, 
Those  cares  are  over,  and  my  glass  runs  low; 
Then  for  that  reason,  and  for  a  season, 
Let  us  be  merry  before  we  go.' 

If  any  one  can  read  the  refrain  of  this  song  without  a  stirring 
in  the  blood,  there  must  be  ice  in  him. 


WILLIAM  GIFFORD   (1756-1826)  » 

In  the  honest  fragment  of  autobiography  which  prefaces  his 
translation  of  Juvenal,  Gifford  tells  us,  perhaps  needlessly, 
that  he  had  no  natural  instinct  for  poetry.  He  comments  on 
his  'gloom  and  savage  unsociability'  and  on  his  waste  of 
exertion  on '  splenetic  and  vexatious  tricks ' ;  and  '  The  Baviad ' 
and  'The  Maeviad '  are  hardly  more  than  so  much  waste,  the 
waste  of  a  prose-writer  who  takes  up  verse  to  chastise  the 
writers  of  bad  verse.  Only  from  the  actual  evidence  of  the 
footnotes  can  we  believe  in  the  existence  of  'Laura's  tinkling 
trash '  and  the  varied  and  unending  ineptitudes  of  Delia 
Crusca.  The  school  existed,  and  Gifford  killed  it;  yet  such 
small  game  leaves  but  mangled  carrion  behind,  and  verse  and 
notes  are  now  equally  unreadable. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE    (1757-1827)  2 


Blake  was  twofold  a  poet,  in  words    and  in  lines,  and  it 
has  often  been  debated  whether  he  was  a  greater  poet  in  words 

1  (1)  Baviad,  1794.    (2)  Maeviad,  1795.     (3)  Epistle  to  Peter  Pindar, 
1800.    (4)  Juvenal,  1820.   (5)  Persius,  1821. 

2  (1)  Poetical  Sketches,  privately  printed,  1783.    (2)  Songs  of  Inno- 
cence, 1789.    (3)  The  Book  of  Thel,  1789.    (4)   The  Marriage  of  Heaven 


38   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

or  in  lines.  If  greatness  includes,  as  I  think  it  must,  a  tech- 
nique able  not  only  to  suggest,  but  to  embody,  then  the 
writer  of  the  '  Songs  of  Innocence '  and  the  '  Songs  of  Experi- 
ence' is  unquestionably  greater  than  the  designer  of  all  those 
magnificent  suggestions  which  may  be  more  justly  compared 
with  the  scattered  splendours  of  the  Prophetic  Books.  In  the 
writings  of  the  Prophetic  Books  there  are  fine  passages,  but 
no  achieved  fineness  of  result :  inspiration  comes  and  goes,  un- 
guided;  while  in  the  best  of  the  lyrics  we  have  an  inspiration 
which  is  held  firmly  under  control.  In  the  best  of  the  lyrics 
there  is  an  art  of  verse  which  neither  Coleridge  nor  Shelley 
has  ever  surpassed ;  can  it  quite  be  said  of  even  the  very  best 
of  the  designs,  that  they  have  not  been  surpassed,  in  the  actual 
art  of  design,  by  Leonardo  and  Michael  Angelo? 

It  is  only  in  his  earliest  work,  in  the  volume  of  'Poetical 
Sketches,'  printed  in  1783  but  never  published,  that  any  ori- 
gins can  be  found  for  the  poetry  of  Blake,  and  even  there 
they  are  for  the  most  part  uncertain  and  of  little  significance. 
We  are  told  in  the  'advertisement'  at  the  beginning  of  the 
book  that  'the  following  Sketches  were  the  production  of 

and  Hell,  probably  1790.  (5)  Visions  of  the  Daughters  of  Albion,  1793. 
(6)  For  Children;  The  Gates  of  Paradise,  1793.  (7)  America,  1793.  (8) 
Europe,  1794.  (9)  Songs  of  Experience,  1794.  (10)  The  First  Book  of 
Urizen,  1794.  (11)  The  Song  of  Los,  1795.  (12)  The  Book  of  Los,  1795. 
(13)  The  Book  of  Ahania,  1795.  (14)  Milton,  1804.  (15)  Jerusalem,  1804. 
(16)  The  Ghost  of  Abel,  1822.  All  these,  except  the  first,  are  engraved  by- 
Blake,  with  his  own  illustrations  on  the  pages.  The  first  collected  edi- 
tion of  the  Poems,  without  the  Prophetic  Books,  but  containing  the 
poems  in  the  Rossetti  manuscript,  first  printed  in  Gilchrist's  Life  of 
Blake,  1863,  was  edited  for  the  Aldine  Series  by  Mr.  W.  M.  Rossetti  in 
1874.  The  Works  of  William  Blake,  Poetic,  Symbolic,  and  Critical,  edited 
by  E.  J.  Ellis  and  W.  B.  Yeats,  followed  in  1893,  in  three  volumes,  con- 
taining facsimiles  of  most  of  the  Prophetic  Books  and  the  first  printed 
conjectural  text  of  Vala.  Other  editions  of  the  poems  have  followed, 
but  the  only  authoritative  text  is  that  of  Mr.  John  Sampson,  Oxford, 
1904.  This  edition,  however,  does  not  contain  the  Prophetic  Books; 
Jerusalem  and  Milton  were  printed  under  the  editorship  of  A.  G.  B. 
Russell  and  R.  D.  Maclagan  in  1904  and  1907,  and  the  complete  text  of 
the  Prophetic  Books  was  given  by  Mr.  Edwin  Ellis  in  his  Poetical  Works 
of  William  Blake,  2  vols.  1906. 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  39 

untutored  youth,  commenced  in  his  twelfth,  and  occasionally 
resumed  by  the  author  till  his  twentieth  year  ' ;  that  is  to  say, 
between  the  years  1768  and  1777.  The  earliest  were  written 
while  Goldsmith  and  Gray  were  still  living,  the  latest  (if  we 
may  believe  these  dates)  after  Chatterton's  death  but  before 
his  poems  had  been  published.  '  Ossian'  had  appeared  in  1760, 
Percy's  'Reliques'  in  1765.  The  'Reliques'  probably  had 
their  influence  on  Blake,  Ossian  certainly,  an  influence  which 
returns  much  later,  curiously  mingled  with  the  influence  of 
Milton,  in  the  form  taken  by  the  Prophetic  Books.  It  has  been 
suggested  that  some  of  Blake's  mystical  names,  and  his  'fiend 
in  a  cloud,'  came  from  Ossian;  and  Ossian  is  very  evidently 
in  the  metrical  prose  of  such  pieces  as  'Samson'  and  even  in 
some  of  the  imagery  ('  their  helmed  youth  and  aged  warriors 
in  dust  together  lie,  and  Desolation  spreads  his  wings  over 
the  land  of  Palestine').  But  the  influence  of  Chatterton  seems 
not  less  evident,  an  influence  which  could  hardly  have  found 
its  way  to  Blake  before  the  year  1777.  In  the  fifth  chapter 
of  the  fantastic  '  Island  in  the  Moon '  (probably  written  about 
1784)  there  is  a  long  discussion  on  Chatterton,  while  in  the 
seventh  chapter  he  is  again  discussed,  in  company  with  Homer, 
Shakespeare,  and  Milton.  As  late  as  1826  Blake  wrote  on  the 
margin  of  Wordsworth's  preface  to  the  'Lyrical  Ballads': 
'I  believe  both  Macpherson  and  Chatterton  that  what  they 
say  is  ancient  is  so ' ;  and,  on  another  page :  '  I  own  myself  an 
admirer  of  Ossian  equally  with  any  poet  whatever :  of  Rowley 
and  Chatterton  also.'  Whether  it  be  influence  or  affinity, 
it  is  hard  to  say,  but  if  the  '  Mad  Song'  of  Blake  has  the  hint 
of  any  predecessor  in  our  literature,  it  is  to  be  found  in  the 
abrupt  energy  and  stormy  masculine  splendour  of  the  High 
Priest's  Song  in  '  Aella,'  'Ye  who  hie  yn  mokie  ayre' ;  and  if, 
between  the  time  of  the  Elizabethans  and  the  time  of  'My 
silks  and  fine  array'  there  had  been  any  other  song  of  similar 
technique  and  similar  imaginative  temper,  it  was  certainly 
the  Minstrel's  Song  in  '  Aella ' : '  0 !  synge  untoe  mie  roundelaie.' 


40   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Of  the  direct  and  very  evident  influence  of  the  Elizabethans 
we  are  told  by  Malkin,  with  his  quaint  preciseness:  'Shake- 
speare's ''Venus  and  Adonis,"  "Tarquin  and  Lucrece,"and  his 
Sonnets,  .  .  .  poems,  now  little  read,  were  favourite  studies 
of  Mr.  Blake's  early  days.  So  were  Johnson's  Underwoods  and 
his  Miscellanies.'  'My  silks  and  fine  array'  goes  past  John- 
son, and  reaches  Fletcher  if  not  Shakespeare  himself.  And 
the  blank  verse  of  'King  Edward  the  Third'  goes  straight 
to  Shakespeare  for  its  cadence  and  for  something  in  its  manner 
of  speech.  And  there  is  other  blank  verse  which,  among  much 
not  even  metrically  correct,  anticipates  something  of  the 
richness  of  Keats. 

Some  rags  of  his  time  did  indeed  cling  about  him,  but  only 
by  the  edges;  there  is  even  a  reflected  ghost  of  the  pseudo- 
Gothic  of  Walpole  in  '  Fair  Elenor,'  who  comes  straight  from 
the  '  Castle  of  Otranto ' ;  as  '  Gwin  King  of  Norway '  takes 
after  the  Scandinavian  fashion  of  the  day,  and  may  have  been 
inspired  by  'The  Fatal  Sisters'  or  'The  Triumphs  of  Owen'  of 
Gray.  '  Blindman's  Bluff,'  too,  is  a  piece  of  eighteenth-cen- 
tury burlesque  realism.  But  it  is  in  the  ode  'To  the  Muses' 
that  Blake  for  once  accepts,  and  in  so  doing  clarifies  the 
smooth  convention  of  the  eighteenth-century  classicism,  and, 
as  he  reproaches  it  in  its  own  speech,  illuminates  it  suddenly 
with  the  light  it  had  rejected :  — 

'  How  have  you  left  the  ancient  love 
That  bards  of  old  enjoyed  in  you ! 
The  languid  strings  do  scarcely  move, 
The  sound  is  forced,  the  notes  are  few! ' 

In  those  lines  the  eighteenth  century  dies  to  music;  and  from 
this  time  forward  we  find,  in  the  rest  of  Blake's  work,  only  a 
proof  of  his  own  assertion :  that  '  the  ages  are  all  equal ;  but 
genius  is  above  the  age.' 

To  define  the  poetry  of  Blake  one  must  find  new  definitions 
for  poetry ;  but,  these  definitions  once  found,  he  will  seem  to  be 
the  only  poet  who  is  a  poet  in  essence;  the  only  poet  who 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  41 

could,  in  his  own  words,  'enter  into  Noah's  rainbow,  and  make  . 
a  friend  and  companion  of  one  of  these  images  of  wonder, 
which  always  entreat  him  to  leave  mortal  things.'  In  this: 
verse  there  is,  if  it  is  to  be  found  in  any  verse,  the  '  lyrical  cry ' ; 
and  yet,  what  voice  is  it  that  cries  in  this  disembodied  ec- 
stasy? The  voice  of  desire  is  not  in  it,  nor  the  voice  of  passion, 
nor  the  cry  of  the  heart,  nor  the  cry  of  the  sinner  to  God,  nor  of 
the  lover  of  nature  to  nature.  It  neither  seeks  nor  aspires  nor 
laments  nor  questions.  It  is  like  the  voice  of  wisdom  in  a  child, 
who  has  not  yet  forgotten  the  world  out  of  which  the  soul 
came.  It  is  as  spontaneous  as  the  note  of  a  bird ;  it  is  an  affir- 
mation of  life;  in  its  song,  which  seems  mere  music,  it. is  the 
mind  which  sings ;  it  is  lyric  thought.  What  is  it  that  transfixes 
one  in  any  couplet  such  as  this :  — 

'  If  the  sun  and  moon  should  doubt 
They'd  immediately  go  out'? 

It  is  no  more  than  a  nursery  statement,  there  is  not  even  an 
image  in  it,  and  yet  it  sings  to  the  brain,  it  cuts  into  the  very 
flesh  of  the  mind,  as  if  there  was  a  great  weight  behind  it. 
Is  it  that  it  is  an  arrow,  and  that  it  comes  from  so  far,  and  with 
an  impetus  gathered  from  its  speed  out  of  the  sky? 

The  lyric  poet,  every  lyric  poet  but  Blake,  sings  of  love; 
but  Blake  sings  of  forgiveness :  — 

1  Mutual  forgiveness  of  each  vice, 
Such  are  the  gates  of  Paradise.' 

Poets  sing  of  beauty,  but  Blake  says :  — 

'  Soft  deceit  and  idleness, 
These  are  Beauty's  sweetest  dress.' 

They  sing  of  the  brotherhood  of  men,  but  Blake  points  to  the 
'  divine  image ' :  — 

'  Cruelty  has  a  human  heart, 
And  Jealousy  a  human  face ; 
Terror  the  human  form  divine, 
And  Secrecy  the  human  dress.' 


42   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Their  minds  are  touched  by  the  sense  of  tears  in  human  things, 
but  to  Blake  'a  tear  is  an  intellectual  thing.'  They  sing  of 
'a  woman  like  a  dewdrop,'  but  Blake  of  'the  lineaments 
of  gratified  desire.'  They  shout  hymns  to  God  over  a  field  of 
battle  or  in  the  arrogance  of  material  empire;  but  Blake  ad- 
dresses the  epilogue  of  his  '  Gates  of  Paradise '  '  to  the  Accuser 
who  is  the  God  of  this  world ' :  — 

'Truly,  my  Satan,  thou  art  but  a  dunce, 
And  dost  not  know  the  garment  from  the  man; 
Every  harlot  was  a  virgin  once, 
Nor  canst  thou  ever  change  Kate  into  Nan. 
Though  thou  art  worshipped  by  the  names  divine 
Of  Jesus  and  Jehovah,  thou  art  still 
The  son  of  morn  in  weary  night's  decline,  *    A 

The  lost  traveller's  dream  under  the  hill.'  ^CXwUVllM 

Other  poets  find  ecstasy  in  nature,  but  Blake  only  in  imagina- 
tion. He  addresses  the  Prophetic  Book  of '  The  Ghost  of  Abel ' 
'to  Lord  Byron  in  the  Wilderness,'  and  asks:  'What  doest 
thou  here,  Elijah?  Can  a  poet  doubt  of  the  visions  of  Je- 
hovah? Nature  has  no  outline,  but  Imagination  has.  Nature 
has  no  Time,  but  Imagination  has.  Nature  has  no  supernat- 
ural, and  dissolves.  Imagination  is  eternity.'  The  poetry  of 
Blake  is  a  poetry  of  the  mind.,  abstract  in  substance,  concrete 
in  form;  its  passion  is  the  passion  of  the  imagination,  its 
emotion  is  the  emotion  of  thought,  its  beauty  is  the  beauty 
of  idea.  When  it  is  simplest,  its  simplicity  is  that  of  some 
'infant  joy'  too  young  to  have  a  name,  or  of  some  'infant 
sorrow'  brought  aged  out  of  eternity  into  the  'dangerous 
world,'  and  there 

'  Helpless,  naked,  piping  loud, 
Like  a  fiend  hid  in  a  cloud.' 

There  are  no  men  and  women  in  the  world  of  Blake's  poetry, 
only  primal  instincts  and  the  energies  of  the  imagination. 

His  work  begins  in  the  Garden  of  Eden,  or  of  the  childhood 
of  the  world,  and  there  is  something  in  it  of  the  naivete"  of 
beasts:  the  lines  gambol  awkwardly,  like  young  lambs.    His 


WILLIAM   BLAKE  43 

utterance  of  the  state  of  innocence  has  in  it  something  of 
the  grotesqueness  of  babies,  and  enchants  the  grown  man,  as 
they  do.  Humour  exists  unconscious  of  itself,  in  a  kind  of 
awed  and  open-eyed  solemnity.  He  stammers  into  a  speech 
of  angels,  as  if  just  awakening  out  of  Paradise.  It  is  the  primal 
instincts  that  speak  first,  before  riper  years  have  added  wis- 
dom to  intuition.  It  is  the  supreme  quality  of  this  wisdom  that 
it  has  never  let  go  of  intuition.  It  is  as  if  intuition  itself 
ripened.  And  so  Blake  goes  through  life  with  perfect  mastery 
of  the  terms  of  existence,  as  they  present  themselves  to  him ; 
'perfectly  happy,  wanting  nothing,'  as  he  said,  when  he  was 
old  and  poor;  and  able  in  each  stage  of  life  to  express  in  art 
the  corresponding  stage  of  his  own  development.  He  is  the 
only  poet  who  has  written  the  songs  of  childhood,  of  youth, 
of  mature  years,  and  of  old  age ;  and  he  died  singing. 


Blake  is  the  only  poet  who  sees  all  temporal  things  under  the 
form  of  eternity.  To  him  reality  is  merely  a  symbol,  and  he 
catches  at  its  terms,  hastily  and  faultily,  as  he  catches  at  the 
lines  of  the  drawing-master,  to  represent,  as  in  a  faint  image, 
the  clear  and  shining  outlines  of  what  he  sees  with  the  imagi- 
nation ;  through  the  eye,  not  with  it,  as  he  says.  Where  other 
poets  use  reality  as  a  spring-board  into  space,  he  uses  it  as  a 
foothold  on  his  return  from  flight.  Even  Wordsworth  seemed 
to  him  a  kind  of  atheist,  who  mistook  the  changing  signs  of 
'vegetable  nature'  for  the  unchanging  realities  of  the  imagi- 
nation. '  Natural  objects,'  he  wrote  in  a  copy  of  Wordsworth, 
'always  did  and  now  do  weaken,  deaden,  and  obliterate 
imagination  in  me.  Wordsworth  must  know  that  what  he 
writes  valuable  is  not  to  be  found  in  nature.'  And  so  his 
poetry  is  the  most  abstract  of  all  poetry,  although  in  a  sense 
the  most  concrete.  It  is  everywhere  an  affirmation,  the  register 
of  vision;  never  observation.  To  him  Observation  was  one  of 
the  daughters  of  memory,  and  he  had  no  use  for  her  among 


44   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

his  Muses,  which  were  all  eternal,  and  the  children  of  the  im- 
agination. 'Imagination/  he  said,  'has  nothing  to  do  with 
memory/  For  the  most  part  he  is  just  conscious  that  what  he 
sees  as  '  an  old  man  grey '  is  no  more  than '  a  frowning  thistle ' : 

'For  double  the  vision  my  eyes  do  see, 
And  a  double  vision  is  always  with  me. 
With  my  inward  eyes,  't  is  an  old  man  grey, 
With  my  outward,  a  thistle  across  my  way.' 

In  being  so  far  conscious,  he  is  only  recognising  the  symbol, 
not  admitting  the  reality. 

In  his  earlier  work,  the  symbol  still  interests  him,  he  accepts 
it  without  dispute ;  with  indeed  a  kind  of  transfiguring  love. 
Thus  he  writes  of  the  lamb  and  the  tiger,  of  the  joy  and  sorrow 
of  infants,  of  the  fly  and  the  lily,  as  no  poet  of  mere  observa- 
tion has  ever  written  of  them,  going  deeper  into  their  essence 
than  Wordsworth  ever  went  into  the  heart  of  daffodils,  or 
Shelley  into  the  nerves  of  the  sensitive  plant.  He  takes  only 
the  simplest  flowers  or  weeds,  and  the  most  innocent  or  most 
destroying  of  animals,  and  he  uses  them  as  illustrations  of  the 
divine  attributes.  From  the  same  flower  and  beast  he  can  read 
contrary  lessons  without  change  of  meaning,  by  the  mere 
transposition  of  qualities ;  as  in  the  poem  which  now  reads :  — 

'The  modest  rose  puts  forth  a  thorn, 
The  humble  sheep  a  threatening  horn ; 
While  the  lily  white  shall  in  love  delight, 
Nor  a  thorn,  nor  a  threat,  stain  her  beauty  bright.' 

Mr.  Sampson  tells  us  in  his  notes:  'Beginning  by  writing  — 

'  "  The  rose  puts  envious  .  .  ." 

he  felt  that  "envious"  did  not  express  his  full  meaning,  and 
deleted  the  last  three  words,  writing  above  them  "lustful 
rose,"  and  finishing  the  line  with  the  words  "puts  forth  a 
thorn."   He  then  went  on  — 

' "  The  coward  sheep  a  threatening  horn ; 
While  the  lily  white  shall  in  love  delight, 
And  the  lion  increase  freedom  and  peace;  " 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  45 

at  which  point  he  drew  a  line  under  the  poem  to  show  that  it 
was  finished.  On  a  subsequent  reading  he  deleted  the  last  line, 
substituting  for  it  — 

'  "The  Priest  loves  war,  and  the  soldier  peace," 

but  here,  perceiving  that  his  rhyme  had  disappeared,  he  can- 
celled this  line  also,  and  gave  the  poem  an  entirely  differ- 
ent turn  by  changing  the  word  "lustful"  to  "modest,"  and 
"coward"  to  "humble,"  and  completing  the  quatrain  (as  in 
the  engraved  version)  by  a  fourth  line  simply  explanatory 
of  the  first  three!  This  is  not  merely  obeying  the  idle  im- 
pulse of  a  rhyme,  but  rather  a  bringing  of  the  mind's  impulses 
into  that  land  where  "contraries  mutually  exist."' 

And  when  I  say  that  he  reads  lessons,  let  it  not  be  sup- 
posed that  Blake  was  ever  consciously  didactic.  Conduct  does 
not  concern  him ;  not  doing,  but  being.  He  held  that  edu- 
cation was  the  setting  of  a  veil  between  light  and  the  soul. 
'There  is  no  good  in  education,'  he  said.  'I  hold  it  to  be 
wrong.  It  is  the  great  sin.  It  is  eating  of  the  tree  of  the  know- 
ledge of  good  and  evil.  This  was  the  fault  of  Plato.  He  knew 
nothing  but  the  virtues  and  vices,  and  good  and  evil.  There 
is  nothing  in  all  that.  Everything  is  good  in  God's  eyes.' 
And,  as  he  says  with  his  excellent  courage:  'When  I  tell  the 
truth  it  is  not  for  the  sake  of  convincing  those  who  do  not 
know  it,  but  for  the  sake  of  defending  those  who  do  '  ;  and 
again,  with  still  more  excellent  and  harder  courage:  'When 
I  am  endeavouring  to  think  rightly,  I  must  not  regard  my 
own  any  more  than  other  people's  weaknesses';  so,  in  his 
poetry,  there  is  no  moral  tendency,  nothing  that  might  not  be 
poison  as  well  as  antidote;  nothing  indeed  but  the  absolute 
affirmation  of  that  energy  which  is  eternal  delight.  He  wor- 
shipped energy  as  the  well-head  or  parent  fire  of  life ;  and  to 
him  there  was  no  evil,  only  a  weakness,  a  negation  of  energy, 
the  ignominy  of  wings  that  droop  and  are  contented  in  the 
dust. 


OF    TUC 


46      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

And  so,  like  Nietzsche,  but  with  a  deeper  innocence,  he  finds 
himself  '  beyond  good  and  evil/  in  a  region  where  the  soul  is 
naked  and  its  own  master.  Most  of  his  art  is  the  unclothing 
of  the  soul,  and  when  at  last  it  is  naked  and  alone,  in  that 
'  thrilling  '  region  where  the  souls  of  other  men  have  at  times 
penetrated,  only  to  shudder  back  with  terror  from  the  brink 
of  eternal  loneliness,  then  only  is  this  soul  exultant  with  the 
supreme  happiness. 


In  his  earlier  work  Blake  is  satisfied  with  natural  symbols, 
with  nature  as  symbol ;  in  his  later  work,  in  the  final  message 
of  the  Prophetic  Books,  he  is  no  longer  satisfied  with  what 
then  seems  to  him  the  relative  truth  of  the  symbols  of  reality. 
Dropping  the  tools  with  which  he  has  worked  so  well,  he  grasps 
with  naked  hands  after  an  absolute  truth  of  statement,  which 
is  like  his  attempt  in  his  designs  to  render  the  outlines  of 
vision  literally,  without  translation  into  the  forms  of  human 
sight.  He  invents  names  harsh  as  triangles,  Enitharmon, 
Theotormon,  Rintrah,  for  spiritual  states  and  essences,  and 
he  employs  them  as  Wagner  employed  his  leading  motives,  as 
a  kind  of  shorthand  for  the  memory.  His  meaning  is  no  longer 
apparent  in  the  ordinary  meaning  of  the  words  he  uses;  we 
have  to  read  him  with  a  key,  and  the  key  is  not  always  in  our 
hands ;  he  forgets  that  he  is  talking  to  men  on  the  earth  in  some 
language  which  he  has  learnt  in  heavenly  places.  He  sees 
symbol  within  symbol,  and  as  he  tries  to  make  one  clear  to 
us  he  does  but  translate  it  into  another,  perhaps  no  easier, 
or  more  confusing.  And,  it  must  be  remembered  when  even 
interpreters  like  Mr.  Ellis  and  Mr.  Yeats  falter,  and  confess 
'  There  is  apparently  some  confusion  among  the  symbols,'  that 
after  all  we  have  only  a  portion  of  Blake's  later  work,  and  that 
probably  a  far  larger  portion  was  destroyed  when  the  Peck- 
ham  'angel,'  Mr.  Tatham  (co-partner  in  foolish  wickedness 
with  Warburton's  cook)  sat  down  to  burn  the  books  which  he 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  47 

did  not  understand.  Blake's  great  system  of  wheels  within 
wheels  remains  no  better  than  a  ruin,  and  can  but  at  the  best 
be  pieced  together  tentatively  by  those  who  are  able  to  trace 
the  connection  of  some  of  its  parts.  It  is  no  longer  even  possi- 
ble to  know  how  much  consistency  Blake  was  able  to  give  to 
his  symbols,  and  how  far  he  failed  to  make  them  visible  in 
terms  of  mortal  understanding.  As  we  have  them,  they  evade 
us  on  every  side,  not  because  they  are  meaningless,  but  be- 
cause the  secret  of  their  meaning  is  so  closely  kept.  To  Blake 
actual  contemporary  names  meant  even  more  than  they  meant 
to  Walt  Whitman.  'All  truths  wait  in  all  things,'  said  Walt 
Whitman,  and  Blake  has  his  own  quite  significant  but  per- 
plexing meaning  when  he  writes :  — 

'  The  corner  of  Broad  Street  weeps ;  Poland  Street  languishes 
To  Great  Queen  Street  and  Lincoln's  Inn :  all  is  distress  and  woe.' 

He  is  concerned  now  only  with  his  message,  with  the  '  mi- 
nutely particular '  statement  of  it;  and  as  he  has  ceased  to  ac- 
cept any  mortal  medium,  or  to  allow  himself  to  be  penetrated 
by  the  sunlight  of  earthly  beauty,  he  has  lost  the  means  of 
making  that  message  visible  to  us.  It  is  a  miscalculation  of 
means,  a  contempt  for  possibilities :  not,  as  people  were  once 
hasty  enough  to  assume,  the  irresponsible  rapture  of  madness. 
There  is  not  even  in  these  crabbed  chronicles  the  wild  beauty 
of  the  madman's  scattering  brain ;  there  is  a  concealed  sanity, 
a  precise  kind  of  truth,  which,  as  Blake  said  of  all  truth,  'can 
never  be  so  told  as  to  be  understood,  and  not  be  believed.' 
*  Blake's  form,  or  apparent  formlessness,  in  the  Prophetic 
Books,  was  no  natural  accident,  or  unconsidered  utterance 
of  inspiration.  Addressing  the  public  on  the  first  plate  of 
'Jerusalem'  he  says:  'When  this  verse  was  first  dictated  to 
me,  I  considered  a  monotonous  cadence  like  that  used  by 
Milton  and  Shakespeare  and  all  writers  of  English  blank 
Verse,  derived  from  the  bondage  of  rhyming,  to  be  a  necessary 
and  indispensable  part  of  verse.  But  I  soon  found  that  in  the 


48   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

mouth  of  a  true  orator  such  monotony  was  not  only  awkward, 
but  as  much  a  bondage  as  rhyme  itself.  I  have  therefore  pro- 
duced a  variety  in  every  line,  both  of  cadences  and  number 
of  syllables.  Every  word  and  every  letter  is  studied  and  put 
into  its  fit  place;  the  terrific  numbers  are  reserved  for  the 
terrific  parts,  the  mild  and  gentle  for  the  mild  and  gentle 
parts,  and  the  prosaic  for  inferior  parts ;  all  are  necessary  to 
each  other.'  This  desire  for  variety  at  the  expense  of  unity 
is  illustrated  in  one  of  Blake's  marginal  notes  to  Reynolds' 
'Discourses.'  'Such  harmony  of  colouring'  (as  that  of  Titian 
in  the  Bacchus  and  Ariadne)  'is  destructive  of  Art.  One 
species  of  equal  hue  over  all  is  the  cursed  thing  called  har- 
mony. It  is  the  smile  of  a  fool.'  This  is  a  carrying  to  its  ex- 
treme limit  of  the  principle  that  'there  is  no  such  thing  as 
softness  in  art,  and  that  everything  in  art  is  definite  and 
minute  .  .  .  because  vision  is  determinate  and  perfect'; 
and  that  'colouring  does  not  depend  on  where  the  colours 
are  put,  but  on  where  the  lights  and  darks  are  put,  and  all 
depends  on  form  and  outline,  on  where  that  is  put.'  The  whole 
aim  of  the  Prophetic  Books  is  to  arrive  at  a  style  as  'deter- 
minate and  perfect'  as  vision,  unmodified  by  any  of  the  de- 
ceiving beauties  of  nature  or  of  the  distracting  ornaments 
of  conventional  form.  What  is  further  interesting  in  his 
statement  is  that  he  aimed,  in  the  Prophetic  Books,  at 
producing  the  effect,  not  of  poetry  but  of  oratory,  and  it  is  as 
oratory,  the  oratory  of  the  prophets,  that  the  reader  is  doubt- 
less meant  to  take  them. 

Throughout  the  Prophetic  Books  Blake  has  to  be  translated 
out  of  the  unfamiliar  language  into  which  he  has  tried  to 
translate  spiritual  realities,  literally,  as  he  apprehended  them. 
Just  as,  in  the  designs.which  his  hand  drew  as  best  it  could, 
according  to  its  limited  and  partly  false  knowledge,  from  the 
visions  which  his  imagination  saw  with  perfect  clearness,  he 
was  often  unable  to  translate  that  vision  into  its  real  equiva- 
lent in  design,  so  in  his  attempts  to  put  these  other  mental 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  49 

visions  into  words  he  was  hampered  by  an  equally  false 
method,  and  often  by  reminiscences  of  what  passed  for  'pic- 
turesque' writing  in  the  work  of  his  contemporaries.  He 
was,  after  all,  of  his  time,  though  he  was  above  it;  and  just 
as  he  knew  Michelangelo  only  through  bad  reproductions,  and 
could  never  get  his  own  design  wholly  free,  malleable,  and 
virgin  to  his  'shaping  spirit  of  imagination,'  so,  in  spite  of  all 
his  marvellous  lyrical  discoveries,  made  when  his  mind  was  less 
burdened  by  the  weight  of  a  controlling  message,  he  found 
himself,  when  he  attempted  to  make  an  intelligible  s}-stem 
out  of  the  'improvisations  of  the  spirit,'  and  to  express  that 
system  with  literal  accuracy,  the  half-helpless  captive  of 
formal  words,  conventional  rhythms,  a  language  not  drawn 
direct  from  its  source.  Thus  we  find,  in  the  Prophetic  Books, 
neither  achieved  poems  nor  an  achieved  philosophy.  The 
philosophy  has  reached  us  only  in  splendid  fragments  (the 
glimmering  of  stars  out  of  separate  corners  of  a  dark  sky), 
and  we  shall  never  know  to  what  extent  these  fragments  were 
once  part  of  a  whole.  Had  they  been  ever  really  fused,,  this 
would  have  been  the  only  system  of  philosophy  made  entirely 
out  of  the  raw  material  of  poetry.  As  it  has  come  to  us  un- 
achieved, the  world  has  still  to  wait  for  a  philosophy  untouched 
by  the  materialism  of  the  prose  intelligence. 


'  There  are  three  powers  in  man  of  conversing  with  Para- 
dise,' said  Blake,  and  he  defined  them  as  the  three  sons  of 
Noah  who  survived  the  flood,  and  who  are  Poetry,  Painting, 
and  Music.  Through  all  three  powers,  and  to  the  last  moments 
of  his  life  on  earth,  Blake  conversed  with  Paradise.  We  are 
told  that  he  used  to  sing  his  own  songs  to  his  own  music,  and 
that,  when  he  was  dying,  '  he  composed  and  uttered  songs  to 
his  Maker,'  and  'burst  out  into  singing  of  the  things  he  saw  in 
heaven.'  And  with  almost  the  last  strength  of  his  hands  he 
had  made  a  sketch  of  his  wife,  before  he  'made  the  rafters 


50   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ring/  as  a  bystander  records,  with  the  improvisation  of  his 
last  breath. 

Throughout  life,  his  desire  had  been,  as  he  said,  'To  con- 
verse with  my  friends  in  eternity,  see  visions,  dream  dreams, 
and  prophesy  and  speak  parables  unobserved.'  He  says 
again :  — 

'  I  rest  not  from  my  great  task 
To  open  the  eternal  worlds,  to  open  the  immortal  eyes 
Of  Man  inwards  into  the  worlds  of  thought,  into  eternity, 
Ever  expanding  in  the  bosom  of  God,  the  human  imagination. ' 

And  writing  to  the  uncomprehending  Hayley  (who  had  called 
him  'gentle,  visionary  Blake '),  he  says  again:  'I  am  really 
drunk  with  intellectual  vision  whenever  I  take  a  pencil  or 
graver  into  my  hand.'  To  the  newspapers  of  his  time,  on  the 
one  or  two  occasions  when  they  mentioned  his  name,  he  was 
'  an  unfortunate  lunatic ' ;  even  to  Lamb,  who  looked  upon 
him  as  'one  of  the  most  extraordinary  persons  of  the  age/ 
he  was  a  man  'flown,  whither  I  know  not  —  to  Hades  or  a 
mad  house.'  To  the  first  editor  of  his  collected  poems  there 
seemed  to  be  'something  in  his  mind  not  exactly  sane';  and 
the  critics  of  to-day  still  discuss  his  sanity  as  a  man  and  as  a 
poet. 

It  is  true  that  Blake  was  abnormal ;  but  what  was  abnormal 
in  him  was  his  sanity.  To  one  who  believed  that  'The  ruins 
of  Time  build  mansions  in  eternity/  that  'imagination  is 
eternity/  and  that  'our  deceased  friends  are  more  really  with 
us  than  when  they  were  apparent  to  our  mortal  part/  there 
could  be  none  of  that  confusion  at  the  edge  of  mystery  which 
makes  a  man  mad  because  he  is  unconscious  of  the  gulf.  No 
one  was  ever  more  conscious  than  Blake  was  of  the  limits  of 
that  region  which  we  call  reality  and  of  that  other  region  which 
we  call  imagination.  It. pleased  him  to  reject  the  one. and  to 
dwell  in  the  other,  and  his  choice  was  not  the  choice  of  most 
men,  but  of  some  of  those  who  have  been  the  greatest  saints 
and  the  greatest  artists.  And,  like  the  most  authentic  among 


WILLIAM  BLAKE  51 

them,  he  walked  firmly  among  those  realities  to  which  he 
cared  to  give  no  more  than  a  side-glance  from  time  to  time; 
he  lived  his  own  life  quietly  and  rationally,  doing  always 
exactly  what  he  wanted  to  do,  and  with  so  fine  a  sense  of  the 
subtlety  of  mere  worldly  manners,  that  when,  at  his  one  mo- 
ment of  worldly  success,  in  1793,  he  refused  the  post  of  draw- 
ing-master to  the  royal  family,  he  gave  up  all  his  other  pupils 
at  the  same  time,  lest  the  refusal  should  seem  ungracious  on 
the  part  of  one  who  had  been  the  friend  of  revolutionaries. 
He  saw  visions,  but  not  as  the  spiritualists  and  the  magicians 
have  seen  them.  These  desire  to  quicken  mortal  sight,  until 
the  soul  limits  itself  again,  takes  body,  and  returns  to  reality  ; 
but  Blake,  the  inner  mystic,  desired  only  to  quicken  that  im- 
agination which  he  knew  to  be  more  real  than  the  reality  of 
nature.  Why  should  he  call  up  shadows  when  he  could  talk 
'in  the  spirit  with  spiritual  realities '  ?  'Then  I  asked/  he  says, 
in  the  'Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell,'  'does  a  firm  persuasion 
that  a  thing  is  so  make  it  so?  He  replied :  "All  poets  believe 
that  it  does." ! 

Of  the  definite  reality  of  Blake's  visions  there  can  be  no 
question;  no  question  that,  as  he  once  wrote,  'nothing  can 
withstand  the  fury  of  my  course  among  the  stars  of  God,  and 
in  the  abysses  of  the  accuser.'  But  imagination  is  not  one,  but 
manifold :  and  the  metaphor,  professing  to  be  no  more  than 
metaphor,  of  the  poet,  may  be  vision  as  essential  as  the  thing 
actually  seen  by  the  visionary.  The  difference  between  im- 
agination in  Blake  and  in,  say,  Shakespeare,  is.that  the  one 
(himself  a  painter)  has  a  visuaHmagination  and  |ees  an  image 
or  metaphor  as  a  literal  reality,  while  the  other,,  seeing  it  not 
less  vividly  but  in  a  more  purely  mental  way,  adds  a  '  like ' 
or  an  '  as,'  and  the  image  or  metaphor  comes  to  you  with  its 
apology  or  attenuation,  and  takes  you  less  by  surprise.  But 
to  Blake  it  was  the  universe  that  was  a  metaphor. 


52   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


GEORGE  CRABBE  (1758-1832) 1 

Coleridge,  who  usually  said  the  right  thing  about  poetry, 
said  of  Crabbe :  '  In  Crabbe  there  is  an  absolute  defect  of  the 
high  imagination;  he  gives  me  little  or  no  pleasure:  yet,  no 
doubt,  he  has  much  power  of  a  certain  kind.'  It  is  this  power 
of  a  certain  kind,  not,  obviously  at  least,  of  an  essentially 
poetic  kind,  that  we  have  to  disentangle  and  define,  if  we  can, 
in  the  work  of  the  poet  who,  more  than  any  other,  carried  on 
into  the  nineteenth  the  traditions  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

In  several  of  his  prefaces,  Crabbe  was  at  the  pains  to  explain 
and  even  to  justify  what  he  had  done  in  his  poetry.  With  his 
admirable  frankness  he  confesses:  'With  me  the  way  I  take 
is  not  a  matter  of  choice,  but  of  necessity ' :  or,  as  he  puts 
it  elsewhere :  '  What  I  thought  I  could  best  describe,  that  I 
attempted.'  '  I  have/  says  a  manuscript  fragment  printed  by 
his  son,  '  chiefly,  if  not  exclusively,  taken  my  subjects  and 
characters  from  that  order  of  society  where  the  least  display 
of  vanity  is  generally  to  be  found,  which  is  placed  between 
the  humble  and  the  great.  It  is  in  this  class  of  mankind  that 
more  originality  of  character,  more  variety  of  fortune,  will 
be  met  with.'  In  a  letter  to  his  friend  in  old  age,  Mrs.  Lead- 
beater,  he  says:  'I  will  tell  you  readily  about  my  creatures, 
whom  I  endeavoured  to  paint  as  nearly  as  I  could  and  dared. 
.  .  .  There  is  not  one  of  whom  I  had  not  in  my  mind  the  origi- 
nal; but  I  was  obliged,  in  some  cases,  to  take  them  from  their 
real  situations,  in  one  or  two  instances  to  change  even  the  sex, 
and,  in  many,  the  circumstances.  .  .  .  Indeed,  I  do  not  know 
that  I  could  paint  merely  from  my  own  fancy ;  and  there  is  no 
cause  why  we  should.' 

In  the  preface  to  the  'Tales '  of  1812,  Crabbe  makes  his  most 

1  (1)  Inebriety  (anonymous),  1774.  (2)  The  Candidate,  1780.  (3)  The 
Library,  1781.  (4)  The  Village,  1783.  (5)  The  Newspaper,  1785.  (6)  The 
Parish  Register,  1807.  (7)  The  Borough,  1810.  (8)  Tales  in  Verse,  1812. 
(9)  Talcs  of  the  Hall,  1819.    (10)  Poetical  Works,  8  vols.  1834. 


GEORGE  CRABBE  53 

serious  attempt  to  meet  the  criticisms  of  those  who  doubted 
whether  his  original  and  powerful  work  was,  in  the  strict 
sense,  poetry.  'It  has  been  already  acknowledged/  he  says, 
'  that  these  compositions  have  no  pretensions  to  be  estimated 
with  the  more  lofty  and  heroic  poems ;  but  I  feel  great  reluc- 
tance in  admitting  that  they  have  not  a  fair  and  legitimate 
claim  to  the  poetic  character.'  He  is  one  of  those,  he  says, 
'who  address  their  productions  to  the  plain  sense  and  sober 
judgment  of  their  readers,  rather  than  to  their  fancy  and  im- 
agination ' ;  and  he  affirms  that  many  genuine  poems  '  are 
adapted  and  addressed  to  the  common-sense  of  the  reader,  and 
prevail  by  the  strong  language  of  truth  and  nature.'  'Who 
will  complain,'  he  asks  in  a  passage  intended  for  this  preface, 
'  that  a  definition  of  poetry,  which  excludes  a  great  part  of  the 
writings  of  Pope,  will  shut  out  him '  ?  For,  he  says,  both  in 
Pope  and  Dryden,  there  is, '  no  small  portion  of  this  actuality 
of  relation,  this  nudity  of  description,  and  poetry  without  an 
atmosphere.' 

Actuality  of  relation,  nudity  of  description,  and  poetry 
without  an  atmosphere:  was  there  ever  so  just  a  description, 
so  severe  a  condemnation,  of  a  great  part  of  the  poetry  of 
Crabbe?  It  is  rarely  needful  to  judge  any  writer  except  out 
of  his  own  mouth :  be  sure  that,  if  once  he  begins  to  justify 
himself  against  objections,  he  will  confess  by  the  way  more 
fatal  deficiencies  than  those  he  was  already  charged  with. 
In  a  note  added  by  Wordsworth  in  later  life  to  the  early  poem 
of  'Lucy  Gray,'  he  says  pointedly:  'The  way  in  which  the 
incident  was  treated  and  the  spiritualising  of  the  character 
might  furnish  hints  for  contrasting  the  imaginative  influences 
which  I  have  endeavoured  to  throw  over  common  life  with 
Crabbe's  matter  of  fact  style  of  treating  subjects  of  the  same 
kind.'  It  was  here  that  Crabbe  had  the  critics  of  the  day  on 
his  side,  and  it  was  because  this  'strong  language  of  truth  and 
nature  '  was  set  to  the  fixed  eighteenth-century  cadences,  and 
was  untinged  by  any  'light  that  never  was,  on  sea  or  land,' 


54   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

that  he  was  accepted,  while  Wordsworth  was  only  laughed  at. 
Crabbe  did,  indeed,  do  something  which  was  out  of  fashion 
then:  he  took  nature  fearlessly  at  first  hand,  and  set  down 
what  he  saw  as  he  saw  it ;  and  so  he  was  a  liberating  influence. 
But  he  was  no  revolutionary ;  his  sympathies,  in  matters  of  lit- 
erature, were  always  with  the  past  through  which  he  had  lived. 

The  life  of  Crabbe  takes  us  back  into  the  heart  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  When,  at  the  age  of  twenty-four,  stand- 
ing by  'a  shallow,  muddy  piece  of  water,  as  desolate  and 
gloomy  as  his  own  mind,  called  the  Leech-pond/  he  deter- 
mines '  to  go  to  London  and  venture  all/  Chatterton  had  but 
just  committed  suicide,  and  his  only  acquaintances  in  London 
warn  him  of  a  fate  that  may  well  come  to  be  his,  they  think. 
He  starves  in  poor  lodgings,  tries  the  booksellers  in  vain  'with 
a  view  to  publication/  and  looks  out,  in  the  way  of  the  period, 
for  a  patron.  He  finds  one,  just  not  too  late,  in  Burke,  and  the 
way  is  made  smooth  for  him.  Lord  Thurlow  asks  him  to  break- 
fast, and  puts  an  envelope  into  his  hand  as  he  is  leaving; 
it  contains  one  hundred  pounds.  A  living  is  found  for  him  in 
the  Church,  and  he  goes  back  to  his  native  town  as  a  curate, 
having  met  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds,  and  been  growled  at  by  Dr. 
Johnson,  who  bids  him  '  Never  fear  putting  the  strongest  and 
best  things  you  can  think  of  into  the  mouth  of  your  speaker, 
whatever  may  be  his  condition.' 

His  first  poem,  we  must  remember,  was  published  at  Ips- 
wich in  1775;  and  between  'The  Newspaper  2  of  1785,  in  which 
the  better  start  of  'The  Village '  is  abandoned  for  a  mere  imi- 
tation of  Pope,  and  the  next  poem  which  he  published,  'The 
Parish  Register/  his  first  really  poetical  work,  there  was  an 
interval  of  twenty-two  years.  By  that  year,  1807,  a  new 
century  had  come  with  new  ideals,  men  were  fighting  for  the 
existence  of  their  old  models,  Wordsworth  had  brought  in  a 
new  humanity,  Coleridge  a  new  magic,  Scott  a  new  romance. 
How  much  had  Wordsworth  learnt  from  the  close  grappling 
with  reality  in '  The  Village !  of  1783,  which  appeared  five  years 


GEORGE  CRABBE  55 

before  the  '  Lyrical  Ballads '  ?  And  is  it  fanciful  to  think  that 
Crabbe,  in  turn,  during  those  years  of  silence,  had  learnt  some- 
thing from  the  '  Lyrical  Ballads '  ?  '  There  were  few  modern 
works/  says  his  son,  'which  he  opened  so  frequently'  as  'the 
earlier  and  shorter  poems  of  what  is  called  the  Lake  School.' 
He  did  not  learn  what  he  could  not  quite  unlearn  from  his 
eighteenth-century  training,  for  in  the  fifth  line  of  his  poem 
of  1807  he  still  says  '  Nymphs  and  Swains '  when  he  means  the 
young  men  and  women  of  his  parish.  But  I  can  imagine  the 
work  of  Wordsworth  coming  to  him  as  work  which  after  all 
did,  in  its  different  way,  something  which  he  was  trying  to  do, 
equally  without  a  model,  and  in  another  form  of  the  '  strong 
language  of  truth  and  nature.' 

What  we  know  of  the  life  of  Crabbe,  as  it  is  told  in  the 
excellent  memoir  by  his  elder  son,  can  be  seen,  from  the  first, 
building  up  the  poet,  with  all  his  strength  and  limitations. 
He  was  born  on  the  East  Coast,  at  Aldborough,  where  his 
father,  'a  man  of  imperious  temper  and  violent  passions,' 
was  Salt-master,  or  collector  of  the  salt-duties.  The  house  in 
which  he  was  born  was  long  since  washed  away  by  the  sea ;  it 
was  a  dark  house  with  small  windows,  glazed  with  diamond 
panes.  Aldborough  was  then  a  small  town  of  two  unpaved 
streets,  in  which  hardly  any  one  but  fishermen  and  pilots  lived. 
The  spring-tides  battered  down  the  houses,  from  time  to  time. 
Inland,  the  land  was  sandy  and  full  of  weeds,  the  trees  few  and 
stunted;  marshy  land  lay  between  the  river  and  the  beach. 
The  whole  desolation  of  the  coast,  and  of  the  discoloured  sea, 
has  gone  into  the  verse  of  Crabbe,  to  which  it  has  indeed  given 
its  harsh  and  gloomy  colouring.  At  eighteen  he  began  to 
write  verse  and  to  study  botany,  on  which  he  wrote  a  book, 
which,  on  the  advice  of  a  friend,  he  burned ;  to  find  out  later  on 
that  he  had  made  some  discoveries  which  were  left  for  others 
to  name  and  classify.  His  son  tells  us  that  he  never  saw  him 
doing  nothing;  'out  of  doors  he  had  always  some  object  in 
view,  a  flower,  or  a  pebble,  or  his  note-book,  in  his  hand; 


56   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  in  the  house,  if  he  was  not  writing,  he  was  reading.'  He 
would  compose  his  verse  while  he  was  searching  for  plants, 
insects,  or  minerals;  and  he  would  take  out  his  note-book  and 
write  down  what  he  had  composed.  Near  the  end  of  his  life, 
when  he  was  staying  with  Scott  at  Edinburgh,  he  had  a  lamp 
and  writing  materials  placed  by  his  bedside  every  night ;  and 
he  told  Lady  Scott  that  he  would  have  lost '  many  a  good  hit ' 
if  he  had  not  set  down  at  once  things  that  occurred  to  him  in 
his  dreams.  He  wrote  best  in  autumn,  and  found  an  extraor- 
dinary stimulus  in  a  sudden  fall  of  snow.  He  did  not  care  for 
music,  or  painting,  or  architecture,  or  what  is  usually  held  to 
be  the  beauty  of  natural  scenes  or  things.  But  once,  when  he 
was  living  sixty  miles  inland,  at  Stathern,  he  was  seized  with 
so  sharp  a  desire  for  the  sea  that  he  mounted  his  horse,  rode 
the  sixty  miles  to  the  coast,  bathed,  and  rode  back  again.  In 
botany,  he  cared  chiefly  for  grasses,  and  had  few  showy 
flowers,  but  many  rare  weeds,  in  his  garden ;  in  minerals,  he 
studied  mostly  the  earths  and  sands;  and,  in  entomology, 
small  insects.  He  thought  little  of  any  ordered  beauty,  from 
what  his  son  'must  call  his  want  of  taste' ;  but  he  loved  any 
form  of  exact  science,  and  'could  at  all  times  find  luxury  in 
the  most  dry  and  forbidding  calculations.' 

Crabbe  was  the  botanist  and  geologist  of  the  rockier  strata 
of  men  and  of  the  weeds  and  grasses  of  nature.  He  botanises 
among  the  village  hedgerows,  finding  '  specimens '  of  abnormal 
growth,  or  picks  with  his  hammer  at  the  village  streets,  turning 
up  quartz  or  flint  with  an  odd  relish.  He  is  always  the  investi- 
gator, the  collector,  and  was  indeed  really  a  man  of  science,  to 
whom  science  was  so  vital  that  it  became  almost,  only  never 
quite,  a  thing  of  the  imagination,  or  the  equivalent  of  that 
'shaping  spirit.'  His  stories  are  built  up,  with  method  and  pa- 
tience, detail  added  to  detail,  in  a  strenuous  effort  to  be  truth- 
ful in  regard  to  'the  manners  moving  in  his  way.'  He  wonders 

1  That  books  which  promise  much  of  life  to  give, 
Should  show  so  little  how  we  truly  live,' 


GEORGE  CRABBE  57 

and  resolves  for  his  part  to  let  in  '  truth,  terror,  and  the  day.' 
At  times  he  is  a  masculine  Jane  Austen,  observing  the  trivi- 
alities of  provincial  life  with  unshrinking,  sometimes  with 
gravely  humorous  eyes.   But,  in  his  attempt  to  find 

'  What  shapes  the  Proteus-passions  take 
And  what  strange  waste  of  life  and  joy  they  make,' 

he  is  drawn  most  powerfully  to  those  mean  tragedies  in  which 
Hogarth  had  found  the  matter  of  his  designs,  to  prisons,  work- 
houses, to 

'The  lame,  the  blind,  and,  far  the  happier  they! 
The  moping  idiot,  and  the  madman  gay,'  — 

lines  in  which  his  curious  feeling  about  distraction  of  mind, 
as  a  relief  from  the  too  heavy  burdens  of  reality,  comes  in 
significantly.  The  nearest  road  for  him  from  truth  to  some- 
thing which  is  a  form  of  imagination  lies  in  a  feeling  for  soli- 
tude in  people  and  things;  the  interaction  of  two  solitudes. 
His  finest  effects  are  got  from  the  picture  of  Peter  Grimes, 
enduring  his  slow  misery,  alone  in  his  boat :  — 

'At  the  same  time  the  same  dull  views  to  see, 
The  bounding  marsh-bank  and  the  blighted  tree ; 
The  water  only,  when  the  tides  were  high, 
When  low,  the  mud  half -covered  and  half-dry :' 

of  Abel  Keene  pining  away  wherever  he  can  find  '  a  sad  and 

silent  place,'  by  the  seashore,  the  riverside,  or  among  the 

rushes  in  the  fen;  of  the  condemned  felon  in  his  cell,  counting 

his  meals,  because  each  brings  him  by  one  meal  nearer  to  the 

last  hour, 

'  And  dreams  the  very  thirst  which  then  will  be.' 

It  may  be  noticed  in  passing,  as  an  instance  of  Crabbe's  satis- 
fied conventionality  of  attitude,  that,  though  he  pities  the 
highwayman  for  his  fate,  he  never  doubts  the  justice  of  the 
law  which  has  condemned  him  to  death  for  taking  a  purse. 
What  remained,  to  the  end,  conventional  in  his  way  of  render- 
ing very  downright  fact  may  be  seen  equally  in  the  powerful 


58      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

poem  of  '  Ellen  Orford/  when  Ellen's  husband  hangs  himself, 
and  we  are  told,  — 

'  His  son  suspended  saw  him,  long  bereft 
Of  life,  nor  prospect  of  revival  left.' 

That  false  kind  of  writing,  with  its  worse  echo  of  a  bad  style, 
alternates  everywhere  with  a  naturalness  which  can  go  so  near, 
and  so  agreeably  near,  to  the  actual  cadence  of  ordinary  con- 
versation as  this :  — 

'  But  he  had  chosen  —  we  had  seen  how  shy 
The  girl  was  getting,  my  good  man  and  I.' 

And  the  bare,  pedestrian  style  can  lift,  too,  now  and  again, 
into  such  a  line  as :  — 

'  So  like  a  ghost  that  left  a  grave  for  love ' ; 

or,  in  the  more  thoroughly  warmed  cadences  of  the  poems  in 
shorter  lines,  into  such  a  hurry  and  heaping  up  of  repeated 
sounds  as  this :  — 

'  Their  watchmen  stare,  and  stand  aghast, 
As  on  we  hurry  through  the  dark; 
The  watch-light  blinks  as  we  go  past, 
The  watch-dog  shrinks  and  fears  to  bark : 
The  watch-tower's  bell  sounds  shrill ;  and,  hark ! 
The  free  wind  blows.' 

There  are  moments  in  the  poem  from  which  I  take  these  lines, 
the  early  poem  of  '  Sir  Eustace  Grey/  in  which  certain  effects 
of  two  writers  so  dissimilar  as  Poe  and  Browning  seem  actually 
to  be  forestalled.  There  are  lines  in  'Johannes  Agricola  in 
Meditation  J  (originally  one  of  two  '  Madhouse  Cells ')  which 
have  a  curious  resemblance  with  one  stanza  in  particular  (the 
ninth  stanza  after  the  'Patient?  has  started  on  his  uninter- 
rupted narration  to  the  '  Visitor '  and  the  '  Physician ')  of  this 
scene  in  a  madhouse.  I  am  reminded  of  Poe  in  the  cool  terror 
of  some  of  the  vaguer  and  more  striking  tortures  inflicted  by 
the  'two  fiends  of  darkness.1  Throughout,  there  is  imagina- 
tion, never  quite  rising  to  the  freedom  of  the  poetic  imagina- 


GEORGE  CRABBE  59 

tion,  always  held  in  by  the  long  logical  leash  of  prose  invention ; 
but  genuine,  that  'power  of  a  certain  kind/  which  Coleridge 
speaks  of. 

To  see  the  whole  difference  between  these  two  kinds  of  im- 
aginative power,  we  need  only  contrast  a  passage  representing 
the  affliction  of  'Ellen  Orford'  after  her  desertion  with  a 
single  couplet  from  Wordsworth.  Ellen  says :  — 

'  My  dreams  were  dismal  —  wheresoe'er  I  strayed, 
I  seemed  ashamed,  alarmed,  despised,  betrayed, 
Always  in  grief,  in  guilt,  disgraced,  forlorn, 
Mourning  that  one  so  weak,  so  vile,  was  born ; 
The  earth  a  desert,  tumult  in  the  sea, 
The  birds  affrighted  fled  from  tree  to  tree, 
Obscured  the  setting  sun,  and  everything  like  me.' 

The  mother,  in  Wordsworth,  talking  wildly  to  her  baby, 

says : — 

'  The  breeze  I  see  is  in  the  tree ! 
It  comes  to  cool  my  babe  and  me.' 

In  those  two  ways  of  representing  a  similar  distraction,  the 
strong  feeling  and  methodical  force  of  the  one,  and  the  sudden, 
incalculable  vision  of  the  other,  we  see  precisely  where  prose 
stops  short  and  the  whole  gulf  before  poetry  begins. 

The  writer  whom  Crabbe  perhaps  most  resembles  is  Ma- 
thurin  Regnier,  but  in  Regnier  there  is  a  violent  personal 
quality  which  is  lacking  in  Crabbe,  who,  unlike  the  sixteenth- 
century  satirist,  kept  a  wise  distance  between  the  low  tragedy 
of  his  verse  and  the  middle-class  comforts  of  his  life.  Regnier 
was  '  tout  aux  tavernes  et  aux  Giles,'  and  in  '  Le  Souper  Ridi- 
cule '  and  '  Le  Mauvais  Giste '  he  has  painted  both  with  a  real- 
ism which  has  something  of  Villon's  sharp  personal  outcry 
in  it.  His  '  Macette '  is  a  type  in  whom  Crabbe  would  have  de- 
lighted, but  nothing  in  Crabbe  is  so  critical  of  human  nature. 
The  point  of  view  of  both  is  not  dissimilar. 

'  Voyez  que  c'est  du  monde,  et  des  choses  humaines : 
Toujours  a  nouveaux  maux  naissent  nouvelles  peines,' 


60   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Regnier  tells  us,  drawing  on  his  own  experience,  however,  for 
the  nearest  illustration,  'estant  ne"  pour  souffrir.'  It  was  life, 
unlucky  personal  adventure,  more  than  philosophy  or  obser- 
vation, that  made  Regnier  a  poet ;  and,  even  when  he  sets  out, 
more  deliberately  than  Crabbe,  to  be  the  satirist,  he  is  never  able 
to  control  his  wayward  energies  into  that  disinterested  calm 
which  makes  of  Crabbe  perhaps  the  one  really  objective  poet. 
Byron,  in  a  line  that  has  become  proverbial,  defined  Crabbe 
(whom  he  called  '  the  first  of  living  poets ' )  as  being, 

'Though  nature's  sternest  painter,  yet  her  best.' 

And  Wordsworth,  after  the  death  of  Crabbe,  writing  to  his 
son  in  praise  of  his  father's  works,  says : '  They  will  last,  from 
their  combined  merits  as  Poetry  and  Truth,  full  as  long  as 
anything  that  has  been  expressed  in  verse  since  the}''  first 
made  their  appearance.'  It  was  for  those  'combined  merits,' 
as  we  have  seen,  that  Crabbe  looked  to  be  welcomed  and  re- 
membered. And  the  poetry,  it  seemed  to  him,  was  to  be  the 
natural  product  of  the  truth.  In  a  note  to  Letter  XVI  of 
'The  Borough,'  Crabbe  says:  'Benbow  may  be  thought  too 
low  and  despicable  to  be  admitted  here ;  but  he  is  a  Borough- 
character,  and  however  disgusting  in  some  respects  a  picture 
may  be,  it  will  please  some,  and  be  tolerated  by  many,  if  it  can 
boast  that  one  merit  of  being  a  faithful  likeness.' 

The  point  of  view  is  the  point  of  view  of  Zola.  How  strange 
a  delusion,  that  truth,  without  beauty,  can  have  any  place  in 
art ;  and  how  strange  an  ignorance  of  beauty,  that  looks  upon 
the  fairest  daughter  of  life  as  if  she  were  Pygmalion's  marble, 
condemned  to  remain  forever  on  her  pedestal,  a  stony  despair 
to  all  mortal  lovers.  What  strenuous  qualities  Crabbe  would 
have  added  to  poetry,  if  there  had  been  in  him  the  poetry  to 
add  them  to!  He  has  a  psychology  which  is  not  only  hard, 
firm,  persistent,  and,  in  a  good  sense,  pitiless,  but  subtle  as 
well.  He  would  have  made  one  of  the  greatest  of  our  novelists, 
anticipating  Hardy  and  recalling  Defoe.   There  is  not  a  line 


MRS.   MARY  ROBINSON  61 

in  his  verse,  not  the  finest,  that  would  have  suited  ill  with  a 
simple  and  flexible  prose,  capable  of  such  dark  splendours  as 
those  two  lines  of  'Peter  Grimes'  in  which  the  delirious  man, 
haunted  by  the  sight  of  the  father  whose  life  he  has  threatened 
but  not  taken,  says :  — 

1  He  cried  for  mercy,  which  I  kindly  gave, 
But  he  has  no  compassion  in  his  grave.' 

What  a  novelist  was  lost  in  the  burning  of  those  three  novels 
which  were  written  in  the  winters  in  Suffolk,  during  one  or 
two  of  those  twenty-two  years  of  silence!  The  third  novel, 
says  Crabbe's  son  in  his  biography,  'opened  with  a  description 
of  a  wretched  room,  similar  to  some  that  are  presented  in 
his  poetry/  and  he  remembers  that,  'on  my  mother's  telling 
him  frankly  that  she  thought  the  effect  very  inferior  to  that 
of  the  corresponding  pieces  in  verse,  he  paused  in  his  read- 
ing, and,  after  some  reflection,  said,  "  Your  remark  is  just."  ' 
Whereupon  the  three  manuscripts  were  burnt. 

Perhaps,  however,  Mrs.  Crabbe  was  right;  and  this  poet 
with  the  genius  of  prose  could  never  have  written  in  prose  so 
well  as  he  wrote  in  verse.  Nature  is  as  capricious  in  the  assort- 
ment of  tendency  and  capacity  as  in  the  assortment  of  body 
and  mind.  As  certainly  as  we  find  inner  beauty  robed  in  mean 
flesh,  timid  souls  faltering  under  fierce  beards,  and  the  lees 
of  all  corruption  under  an  aspect  of  lilied  candour,  so  cer- 
tainly do  we  find  men  of  genius  condemned  to  labour  all  their 
lives  at  a  task  which  is  not  their  task,  and  in  which  they  must 
seem  to  be  no  more  than  half  themselves. 


MRS.   MARY  ROBINSON  (1758-1800) 1 

The  Perdita  of  the  Prince  of  Wales,  Mary  Robinson,  began 
writing  verses  in  the  King's  Bench  prison  at  the  age  of  seven- 
teen; she  went  on  the  stage,  where  she  was  famous,  and, 
1  The  Poetical  Works  of  the  late  Mrs.  Mary  Robinson,  3  vols.  1806. 


62   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

after  many  conquests  and  adventures,  returned  to  the  writing 
of  verse,  and  called  herself  by  the  name  of  the  English  Sappho. 
It  is  under  that  signature  that  she  wrote  an  ode  to  Coleridge, 
in  which  she  says  archly :  — 

'  Spirit  divine  I   with  thee  I  '11  trace 
Imagination's  boundless  space ! ' 

She  had  just  before  sent  him  another  ode,  on  his  latest  baby, 
'  born  Sept.  14,  1800,  at  Keswick,  in  Cumberland ' :  Derwent, 
that  would  be.  Not  the  least  ardent  or  accomplished  of  her 
poems  was  a  sonnet  sequence:  'Sappho  and  Phaon,  in  a 
series  of  legitimate  sonnets/  where  she  characterises  her 
'whose  lyre  throbbed  only  to  the  touch  of  love'  as  'the 
brightest  planet  of  the  eternal  sphere.'  The  subject  lends  her 
eloquence,  and  she  bursts  out :  — 

'  Ye,  who  in  alleys  green  and  leafy  bowers, 
Sport,  the  rude  children  of  fantastic  births ; 
Where  frolic  nymphs,  and  shaggy  tribes  of  mirth, 
In  clamorous  revels  waste  the  midnight  hours.' 

She  is  not  always  so  good,  and  her  attempt  at  drama,  in  'The 
Sicilian/  is  distinctly  amusing.  '  He  lives !  he  lives !  It  is  my 
Alferenzi ! '  shouts  one  character,  and  another,  taking  the  op- 
posite view,  believes  that  Alferenzi  is  dead. 

'  I  fear  he  was :  most  sure  I  am  he  died ! 
His  cheek  was  pale,  and  petrified,  and  cold! 
But  I  entreat  you  let  us  change  the  matter, 
For  't  is  a  wounding  subject.' 

Odes  overflow  the  pages,  'Lines  to  him  who  will  understand 
them/  perhaps  one  of  those 

'whose  soul  like  mine, 
Beams  with  poetic  rays  divine,' 

or  Delia  Crusca  perhaps,  'enlightened  Patron  of  the  sacred 
Lyre.'  All  these  overflow  with  feminine  italics  and  capitals 
and  dashes  and  notes  of  exclamation.  At  times,  quieting 
down,  she  can  characterise  those  who  '  seek  fame  by  different 
roads '  in  eight  stanzas  done  after  this  manner :  — 


JOANNA  BAILLIE  63 

'Ladies  gambling  night  and  morning; 
Fools  the  work  of  genius  scorning ; 
Ancient  dames  for  girls  mistaken, 
Youthful  damsels  quite  forsaken.' 

And  in  another  poem  in  the  same  metre  she  becomes  a  little 
bewilderingly  personal ;  for,  — 

'  Where  conscious  Rectitude  retires; 
Instructive  Wisdom;  calm  Desires; 
Prolific  Science  —  lab'ring  Art; 
And  Genius,  with  expanded  heart '  — 

there,  on  her  own  authority,  Mrs.  Mary  Robinson  also  is. 


JOANNA  BAILLIE  (1762-1851)  » 

Crabb  Robinson  tells  us  in  his  diary  that  Wordsworth  said 
to  him  of  Joanna  Baillie :  '  If  I  had  to  present  any  one  to  a 
foreigner  as  a  model  of  an  English  gentlewoman  it  would  be 
Joanna  Baillie.'  It  was  this  good  lady  who  proposed  to  herself 
the  aim,  in  a  'Series  of  plays,  in  which  it  is  attempted  to 
delineate  the  stronger  passions  of  the  mind,  each  passion  being 
the  subject  of  a  tragedy  and  a  comedy,'  to  '  add  a  few  pieces 
to  the  stock  of  what  may  be  called  our  national  or  permanently 
acting  plays.'  She  begins  with  a  plan  perfectly  matured,  and 
reproaches  those  dramatists  who  have  'made  use  of  the  pas- 
sions to  mark  their  several  characters,  and  animate  their 
scenes,  rather  than  to  open  to  our  view  the  nature  and  por- 
traitures of  those  great  disturbers  of  the  human  breast,  with 
whom  we  are  all,  more  or  less,  called  upon  to  contend.'  She 
had  already  written  some  scattered  lyrics,  some  of  them, 
especially  those  in  the  Scottish  dialect,  not  without  the  lyrical 
touch,  and  it  does  not  seem  to  have  occurred  to  her  to  ask  her- 

1  (1)  Fugitive  Verses,  1790.  (2)  Plays  on  the  Passions,  3  vols.,  1798, 
1802,  1812.  (3)  Miscellaneous  Plays,  1804.  (4)  Metrical  Legends  of 
Exalted  Characters,  1821.  (5)  Poetic  Miscellanies,  1823.  (6)  The  Martyr 
1826.    (7)  Miscellaneous  Plays,  1836. 


64      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

self  whether  such  an  aim  at  close  truth  to  nature,  and  the 
exclusion  of  imagination,  as  she  approved  of  in  the  writing 
of  moral  drama,  might  not  have  been  better  attained  in  prose 
than  in  verse.  In  one  of  the  tragic  plays  she  does,  indeed,  with 
some  apology,  use  prose,  and  to  the  advantage  of  the  some- 
what melodramatic  material,  surprisingly  direct,  and  with  a 
certain  human  feeling  in  it,  which  comes  to  us  in  the  verse,  as 
if  disguised  under  a  thin  clothing.  This  fixed,  formal  study 
of  the  passions  leads  naturally  to  something  too  deliberate 
for  drama ;  passion  being  too  often  treated  as  if  it  were  a  form 
of  logic,  or  followed  recognisable  rules  of  human  nature.  It 
was  a  brave  adventure,  and  had  many  lessons  to  teach  the 
more  fantastic,  Germanising  dramatists  of  her  time.  '  Modern 
Poetry/  she  laments  in  a  preface,  'within  these  last  thirty 
years,  has  become  so  imaginative,  impassioned,  and  senti- 
mental, that  more  homely  subjects,  in  simple  diction,  are  held 
in  comparatively  small  estimation.'  Throughout  we  feel  and 
respect  the  woman's  diligent  application  to  a  task  or  mission : 
the  creation  of  a  serious  drama,  the  elevation  of  the  theatre. 
And  what  is  most  surprising,  and  all  that  remains  interesting 
to  us  now,  when  the  plays  themselves  have  dropped  quietly 
out  of  existence,  is  to  see  the  practical  sense  of  the  conditions 
of  the  stage  which  comes  out  in  preface  and  foot-notes,  really 
anticipating  discoveries  which  are  only  now  being  put  into 
practice.  She  protests  against  the  footlights,  on  the  analogy 
of  the  art  of  the  painter,  who,  when  he  '  wishes  to  give  intelli- 
gence and  expression  to  a  face,  does  not  make  his  lights  hit 
upon  the  under  part  of  his  chin,  the  nostrils,  and  the  under 
curve  of  the  eyebrows.'  And,  she  adds,  'daylight  comes  from 
heaven,  not  from  the  earth;  even  within  doors  our  whitened 
ceilings  are  made  to  throw  down  reflected  light  upon  us,  while 
our  pavements  and  carpets  are  of  a  darker  colour.'  And  she 
imagines,  in  those  days  of  boxes  on  the  stage,  almost  the 
'mystic  gulf!  of  Wagner:  'The  front-piece  at  the  top;  the 
boundary  of  the  stage  from  the  orchestra  at  the  bottom ;  and 


WILLIAM  LISLE  BOWLES  65 

the  pilasters  at  each  side,  would  then  represent  the  frame 
of  a  great  moving  picture,  entirely  separated  and  distinct 
from  the  rest  of  the  theatre.' 


SIR  SAMUEL  EGERTON  BRYDGES   (1762-1837)  l 

Sir  Egerton  Brydges,  who  must  be  respected  for  the  editions 
printed  at  his  Lee  Priory  Press,  in  an  '  Invocation  to  Poetry/ 
which  he  wrote  at  the  age  of  twenty,  but,  twenty  years  after- 
wards, still  put  at  the  beginning  of  his  poems,  represents  him- 
self as  calling  that  '  wild  maid '  to  go  with  him  into  the  woods 
('  and  let  not  coy  excuse  thy  steps  retard ')  and  then  falling 
asleep  in  her  company,  and  dreaming  of  'fame  immortal.' 
The  episode  seems  characteristic ;  Sir  Egerton  Brydges  always 
fell  asleep  when  he  found  himself  in  the  company  of  Poetry. 


WILLIAM  LISLE  BOWLES   (1762-1850)  2 

William  Lisle  Bowles  was  born  in  1762  and  died  in  extreme 
old  age,  a  canon  of  Salisbury,  in  1850.  His  first  volume,  a 
collection  of  twenty  sonnets,  'written  amidst  various  interest- 
ing scenes,  during  a  tour  under  youthful  dejection/  was  pub- 

1  (1)  Sonnets  and  Other  Poems,  1785.  (2)  Select  Poems,  1814.  (3) 
Occasional  Poems,  1814.  (4)  Bertram,  1814.  (5)  Dunlace  Castle,  1814. 
(6)  Fragment  of  a  Poem,  1814.  (7)  To  the  Friends  and  Admirers  of 
Robert  BloomfieM,  1816.  (8)  Verses  addressed  to  Lady  Brydges  (?).  (9) 
To  a  Lady,  1817.  (10)  Odo  Count  of  Lingen,  1824.  (11)  A  Poem  on  Birth, 
1831.  (12)  Elegiac  Lines,  1832.  (13)  Lake  of  Geneva,  1832.  (14)  Hu- 
man Fate,  1846.    (15)  Darkness,  An  Ode,  1870. 

2  (1)  Fourteen  Sonnets,  written  chiefly  on  Picturesque  Spots  during 
a  journey,  1789.  (2)  Verses  to  John  Howard,  1789.  (3)  Coombe  Ellen, 
1798.  (4)  St.  Michael's  Mount,  1798.  (5)  The  Battle  of  the  Nile,  1799. 
(6)  The  Sorrows  of  Switzerland,  1801.  (7)  The  Picture,  1803.  (8)  The 
Spirit  of  Discovery,  1804.  (9)  Bowden  Hill,  1806.  (10)  The  Missionary 
of  the  Andes,  1815.  (11)  The  Grave  of  the  Last  Saxon,  1822.  (12)  Ellen 
Gray,  1823.  (13)  Days  Departed,  1828.  (14)  St.  John  in  Patmos,  1833. 
(15)  Scenes  and  Splendours  of  Days  De-parted,  1837.  (16)  The  Village 
Hymnbook,  1837.    (17)  Poetical  Works,  1855. 


66   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Iished  in  1789,  and  a  copy  of  it,  coming  into  the  hands  of 
Coleridge,  at  the  age  of  seventeen,  did  much  to  decide  the 
early  course  of  Coleridge's  poetry,  for  he  had  not  then  seen 
any  of  the  work  of  Cowper,  and,  as  he  tells  us  in  the  '  Biogra- 
phia  Literaria,'  '  of  the  then  living  poets  Bowles  and  Cowper 
were,  to  the  best  of  my  knowledge,  the  first  who  combined 
natural  thoughts  with  natural  diction:  the  first  who  recon- 
ciled the  heart  with  the  head.'  Bowles  was  afterwards  to  en- 
ter into  a  controversy  with  Byron,  on  the  side  of  nature  against 
the  formal  art  of  Pope,  and  in  contention,  as  he  says,  that 
•  passions  of  nature,  not  morals,  or  manners  of  life,  constitute 
the  eternal  basis  of  what  is  sublime  or  beautiful  in  poetry.' 
It  was  this  tendency,  quite  out  of  fashion  at  the  time,  that 
had  its  effect  upon  Coleridge,  and  though  the  work  itself  was 
uninspired,  it  was  unforced.  In  one  of  his  prefaces  Bowles 
says, '  There  is  a  great  difference  between  natural  and  fabricated 
feelings,  even  in  poetry,'  and  there  is  something  which  at  that 
time  would  seem  exceptionally  natural  and  direct  in  sonnets 
which,  as  he  puts  it  with  his  usual  awkward  straightforward- 
ness, '  exhibit  occasional  reflections  which  naturally  arose  in  his 
mind,  chiefly  during  various  excursions  undertaken  to  relieve, 
at  the  time,  depression  of  spirits,'  due,  he  tells  us,  'to  the 
sudden  death  of  a  deserving  young  woman.'  Bowles  tells  us 
that  he  inherited  a  love  of  landscape  from  his  father,  and  from 
his  mother  a  susceptibility  to  music,  and  especially  to  the 
sound  of  bells,  of  which  he  says :  — 

'  The  mournful  magic  of  their  mingling  chime 
First  waked  my  wondering  childhood  into  tears.' 

Coleridge's  moralising  landscapes  are  distinctly  foreshadowed 
in  those  of  Bowles,  and  something  not  altogether  of  his  best 
manner,  something  of  the  over-sweetness  of  its  simplicity, 
can  be  seen  in  lines  like  these :  — 

'Her  voice  was  soft,  which  yet  a  charm  could  lend 
Like  that  which  spoke  of  a  departed  friend, 
And  a  meek  sadness  sat  upon  her  smile.' 


GEORGE  COLMAN  THE  YOUNGER  67 

Bowles  himself,  who  repaid  Coleridge's  early  devotion  with  a 
charming  gratitude,  guessed  that  if  in  future  years  any  one 
cared  to  ask  '  who  was  W.  L.  Bowles  ? '  it  might  be  for  Cole- 
ridge's sake,  and  it  is  true  that  we  turn  to  these  gentle  amia- 
bilities of  verse  chiefly  because  they  showed  Coleridge  that 
contemporary  poetry  was  not  obliged  to  be  'glittering,  cold, 
and  transitory/  after  the  manner  of  Darwin's  'Botanic  Gar- 
den/ and  that  it  was  possible  to  look  at  natural  things  with 
the  eyes  and  to  express  the  natural  feelings  of  the  heart.  '  Gen- 
ius of  the  sacred  fountain  of  tears/  Lamb  wrote  to  Coleridge 
in  1796,  with  unusual  pomp,  'it  was  he  who  led  you  through 
all  this  valley  of  weeping.' 


GEORGE  COLMAN  THE  YOUNGER  (1762-1836)  « 

George  Colman  the  Younger  was,  in  his  time,  a  prolific  writer 
of  farce ;  he  attempted,  in  a  futile  way,  to  write  seriously  in 
blank  verse;  and  to  this  day  his  name  has  not  disappeared 
entirely  from  the  records  of  acted  stage  plays.  He  also  at- 
tempted humorous  verse,  and  wrote  a  vulgar  kind  of  it  copi- 
ously. In  his  'Poetical  Vagaries/  a  quarto  heaped  up  with 
humourless  garbage,  after  announcing :  — 

'Yet,  here,  will  I  apostrophize  thee,  Time! 
If  not  in  reason,  why  in  Crambo  Rhime,' 

he  is  reasonable  enough  to  admit  to  the  reader :  — 

'But,  should  I  grow  prolix,  alas! 
Thou  never  would'st  kill  Time  by  reading  Me.' 

The  main  part  of  the  volume  consists  in  a  coarse  and  inept 
parody  of  '  The  Lady  of  the  Lake/  which  is  called '  The  Lady  of 
the  Wreck  or  Castle  Blarneygig'  and  introduced  in  this  man- 

1  (1)  Songs  from  Two  to  One,  1784.  (2)  My  Night-Gown  and  Slippers, 
1797.  (3)  Broad  Grins,  1802.  (4)  Poetical  Vagaries,  1812.  (5)  Vaga- 
ries Vindicated,  1813.  (6)  Eccentricities  for  Edinburgh,  1816.  (7)  The 
Humorous  Works  of  George  Colman,  no  date.  7  plays,  4  vols.,  Paris,  1827. 


68      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ner:  'The  author  of  this  Work  has  attempted,  in  this  in- 
stance, to  become  a  Maker  of  the  M odern- Antique ;  a  Vender 
of  a  new  Coinage,  being  rimed  with  the  ancient  oerugo;  a  Con- 
structor of  the  dear  pretty  Sublime,  and  sweet  little  Grand.' 
1  How  is  such  a  Writer  to  be  class'd?'  he  ends  by  asking.  But 
he  has  written  himself  down  already  as  a  factor  of  'Broad 
Grins/  and  needs  no  further  classing. 


SAMUEL    ROGERS   (1763-1855)  « 

Samuel  Rogers  was  not  a  poet,  but  he  was  an  unaffected 
and  pleasantly  old-fashioned  writer  of  verse ;  and  as  he  was 
rich,  and  kind-hearted,  and  sharp-tongued,  he  lived  to  be  a 
very  old  man  without  losing  a  kind  of  unofficial  leadership  of 
the  poetry  of  his  period,  though  for  long,  as  Byron  said,  '  re- 
tired upon  half-pay.'  It  was  Byron  who  gave  him  the  most 
thorough  praise  he  got,  putting  him  next  to  Scott,  and  thus 
only  just  below  the  apex  of  his  'triangular  Gradus  ad  Par- 
nassum,'  in  which  Moore  and  Campbell  came  third,  and 
Southey,  Wordsworth,  and  Coleridge  just  above  the  indistin- 
guishable 'many.'  And  when  Byron  set  him  there  ('more  as 
the  last  of  the  best  school')  he  professed  to  have  'ranked  the 
names  upon  my  triangle  more  upon  what  I  believe  popular 
opinion  than  any  decided  opinion  of  my  own.'  This  was  merely 
a  way  of  trying  to  add  weight  to  what  was  really  his  own 
decided  opinion;  for  he  returns  to  Rogers  again  and  again, 
in  his  letters  and  controversial  writings,  ranking  him  with 
Goldsmith  and  Campbell  as  '  the  most  successful '  of  the  dis- 
ciples of  Pope,  and  with  Crabbe  as  the  only  poet  of  the  day 
who  was  not  'in  the  wrong,'  'upon  a  wrong  revolutionary 
poetical  system.'    'And  thou,  melodious  Rogers!'  he  had  in- 

1  (1)  An  Ode  to  Superstition,  1786.  (2)  The  Pleasures  of  Memory, 
1792.  (3)  Epistle  to  a  Friend,  1798.  (4)  Columbus,  privately  printed, 
1812.  (5)  Jacqueline,  1814.  (6)  Human  Life,  1819.  (7)  Italy,  1822.  (8) 
Italy,  second  part,  1828. 


SAMUEL  ROGERS  69 

voked  him,  in  the  'English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers/ 
bidding  him  '  restore  Apollo  to  his  vacant  throne.'  Fifty  years 
afterwards  Rogers  is  still  a  notable  person  to  Elizabeth  Bar- 
rett, who,  'not  a  devout  admirer  of  "The  Pleasures  of 
Memory,"  does  admire  this  perpetual  youth  and  energy '  of 
the  poet  of  eighty-one  whose  bank  has  been  robbed  of 
£40,000,  and  who  'says  witty  things  on  his  own  griefs.'  And, 
in  1850,  we  find  Ruskin  still  valuing  him  as  a  poet  and  in- 
spirer,  and  writing  to  him  from  Venice:  'Whenever  I  found 
myself  getting  utterly  hard  and  indifferent,  I  used  to  read 
over  a  little  bit  of  the  "Venice  "  in  your  "  Italy,"  and  it  put 
me  always  into  the  right  tone  of  thought  again.'  The  old 
man  to  whom  he  was  writing  had  seen  Haydn  play  at  a 
concert  in  a  tie-wig,  with  a  sword  by  his  side,  and  had  met 
more  than  one  person  who  remembered  Mr.  Alexander  Pope. 
Rogers  was  born  in  1763,  before  any  of  those  who  may  be 
properly  called  his  contemporaries  among  the  poets  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  except  Blake  and  Crabbe,  and  he  died  in 
1855,  after  all  of  them  but  Landor  and  Leigh  Hunt.  He  was 
famous  in  1793  as  the  writer  of  'The  Pleasures  of  Memory,' 
the  most  popular  poem  which  had  appeared  since  Cowper's 
'Task,'  seven  years  earlier;  more  popular  indeed  than  that 
poem  had  ever  been.  Nearly  twenty  years  afterwards,  the 
'  Edinburgh  Review,'  in  not  too  amiable  an  article,  could  say 
of  it  that  it  was  '  to  be  found  in  all  libraries  and  in  most  par- 
lour windows.'  Rogers  seemed,  to  the  critics  of  that  time,  by 
his  '  correctness  of  thought,  delicacy  of  sentiment,  variety  of 
imagery,  and  harmony  of  versification,'  to  be  the  legitimate 
'  child  of  Goldsmith.'  Burns  was  still  alive,  and  he,  with  Blake 
and  Crabbe,  had  already  published  the  poems  which  were 
the  real  heralds  of  the  new  poetry;  but  neither  Burns  nor 
Crabbe  was  universally  known,  and  Blake  was  wholly  un- 
known. Rogers  seemed  to  his  contemporaries  more  '  classical,' 
more  in  the  tradition,  than  Cowper;  his  ease  and  finish  made 
Hayley  and  the  Delia  Cruscans  impossible.   He  was  accepted 


70      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

instantly,  as  Byron  was  to  accept  him  later,  at  least  in  theory, 
as  the  chief  adherent  to  'the  Christianity  of  English  Poetry, 
the  poetry  of  Pope.' 

We  can  read  worse  things  now,  but  we  cannot  read  'The 
Pleasures  of  Memory.'  It  is  not  poetry,  and  there  is  nothing 
in  its  smooth  commonplaces  to  make  up  for  its  not  being 
poetry,  as,  to  some  extent,  there  certainly  is  in  the  later, 
never  quite  so  popular, '  Italy.'  But,  before  '  Italy,'  there  had 
been  'An  Epistle  to  a  Friend,'  which  begins  to  be  more  per- 
sonal and  thus  more  interesting ;  '  The  Voyage  of  Columbus,' 
which  suggested  to  Byron  'the  idea  of  writing  a  poem  in 
fragments,'  'The  Giaour,'  dedicated  to  Rogers;  and  'Jacque- 
line,' which  Byron  found  '  all  grace,  and  softness,  and  poetry,' 
and  which  was  actually  published  under  the  same  covers  with 
'  Lara.'  We  can  read  none  of  these  now,  but  we  can  read  the 
'  Italy,'  almost  as  if  it  were  prose,  but  with  no  distaste  at  its 
being  in  verse. 

'The  Pleasures  of  Memory'  fitted  the  fashion  of  its  day, 
a  fashion  which  was  even  then  passing ;  but  it  could  not  outlast 
that  fashion,  as  the  work  of  many  poets  has  done,  because  it 
had  no  energy  of  life  or  imagination  within  it.  It  was  sincere, 
and  we  can  respect  it  for  its  sincerity ;  but  it  was  the  work  of 
one  who  had  trained  himself  up  to  be  a  poet  as  he  trained  him- 
self up  to  appreciate  and  collect  beautiful  things,  and  to  ac- 
quire worldly  wisdom  by  '  always  listening  to  the  conversation 
of  older  persons.'  His  nephew  tells  us  that  '  he  thought  every 
man  ought  to  have  a  pursuit,  such  as  the  writing  of  a  book, 
which  gave  an  interest  to  life  such  as  was  not  known  without 
it.'  His  poetry  was  simply  the  most  serious  interest  in  life  of  a 
dilettante  who  would  have  lacked  only  an  interest  in  life  with- 
out it.  '  On  all  subjects  of  taste,'  said  Byron, '  his  delicacy  of 
expression  is  as  pure  as  his  poetry.' 

And  so  it  is  in  the  'Italy'  that  he  came  nearest  to  writing 
anything  of  value,  for  that  pleasant  road-book  to  Italy  is  done 
with  a  real  personal  gusto,  and  in  a  blank  verse  which,  as 


SAMUEL  ROGERS  71 

Lamb  said,  'gallops  like  a  traveller,  as  it  should  do,'  and  is  a 
form  which  we  can  read  to-day  more  easily  than  those  couplets 
out  of  which  Rogers  confesses  that  he  got  with  so  much  diffi- 
culty. Wordsworth  found  in  it  'rather  too  strong  a  leaning 
to  the  pithy  and  concise ' ;  but  Rogers  does  not  aim  appreciably 
higher  than  prose,  and  is  wise  in  not  doing  so.  '  Happy  should 
I  be,'  he  says,  'if  by  an  intermixture  of  verse  and  prose,  of 
prose  illustrating  the  verse  and  verse  embellishing  the  prose, 
I  could  furnish  my  countrymen  on  their  travels  with  a  pocket- 
companion.'  Was  not  an  aim  so  humble  more  than  attained 
when  Ruskin,  in  his  '  Prseterita,'  confessed  that  it  was  the 
birthday  gift,  at  the  age  of  thirteen,  of  Rogers'  '  Italy !  that 
'  determined  the  main  tenor  of  his  life  '  ? 

To  go  to  Italy  was  for  Rogers  to  make  a  pilgrimage  to  his 
Holy  Land.  In  his  epilogue  he  says :  — 

'  Nature  denied  him  much, 
But  gave  him  at  his  birth  what  most  he  values ; 
A  passionate  love  for  music,  sculpture,  painting, 
For  poetry,  the  language  of  the  gods, 
For  all  things  here,  or  grand  or  beautiful.' 

It  is  the  idolater  of  art  who  writes  to  a  friend  from  Venice: 
'  Oh,  if  you  knew  what  it  was  to  look  upon  a  lake  which  Virgil 
has  mentioned,  and  Catullus  has  sailed  upon,  to  see  a  house  in 
which  Petrarch  has  lived,  and  to  stand  upon  Titian's  grave  as  I 
have  done,  you  would  instantly  pack  up  and  join  me.'  His 
poem  is  the  warm  direct  record  of  this  enthusiasm ;  only,  the 
verse  is  less  warm  than  the  prose,  the  sentiment  cools  a  little 
in  its  passage  into  verse,  the  sharp  details  of  the  journal  are 
softened,  generalised,  lose  much  of  their  really  poetical  sub- 
stance. When  Byron  went  on  the  grand  tour,  much  less  im- 
pressed really  than  Rogers  by  what  he  saw,  he  transfigured 
all  these  things  in  some  atmosphere  of  his  own,  and  'Childe 
Harold '  is  a  bad  guide-book,  and  not  always  an  honest  or  in- 
telligent comment  of  the  observer,  but  at  least  a  very  startling 
and  personal  poem.   Rogers  will  put  into  his  notes  or  prose 


interludes  such  a  vigorous  utterance  as  this :  '  When  a  despot 
lays  his  hand  on  a  free  city,  how  soon  must  he  make  the  dis- 
covery of  the  rustic,  who  bought  Punch  of  the  puppet-show 
man,  and  complained  that  he  would  not  speak ' !  Turning  to 
the  verse,  you  find  vaguer  epithets  or  a  fainter  discourse,  as  in 
the  inexpressive  lines  which  call  forth  that  beautiful  and  signi- 
ficant note  (which  Rogers  says  he  wrote  ten  times  over  before 
he  was  satisfied  with  it)  on  the  Dominican  at  Padua,  who, 
looking  on  his  companions  at  the  refectory  table  and  then  at 
the  Last  Supper  fading  off  the  painted  wall,  was  'sometimes 
inclined  to  think  that  we,  and  not  they,  are  the  shadows.'  Had 
he  but  realised  it,  it  is  as  a  prose-writer  that  Rogers  might 
have  lived. 

Rogers  was  a  man  of  letters,  and  holds  a  position  in  the 
history  of  letters  in  England,  almost  apart  from  the  actual 
quality  of  his  work.  This  'grim  old  dilettante,  full  of  sardonic 
sense/  as  Carlyle  called  him,  was  the  typical  man  of  taste  of 
his  time:  'his  god  was  harmony/  Mrs.  Norton  said  of  him. 
His  house  was  as  carefully  studied  as  his  poems,  and  as  elab- 
orately decorated;  the  Giorgione  'Knight  in  Armour/  now 
in  the  National  Gallery,  was  one  of  his  pictures.  Byron  paid 
Rogers  many  extravagant  compliments,  but  he  was  defining 
him  very  justly  when  in  '  Beppo/  he  classed  him  with  Scott  and 
Moore  as '  Men  of  the  world,  who  know  the  world  like  men.'  He 
was  not  a  great  talker,  but  he  had  and  deserved  a  reputation 
for  neat,  not  always  amiable,  wit.  'They  tell  me  I  say  ill- 
natured  things/  he  said  to  Sir  Henry  Taylor.  'I  have  a  very 
weak  voice;  if  I  did  not  say  ill-natured  things  no  one  would 
hear  what  I  said.'  He  was  a  benefactor  to  Wordsworth,  to 
Campbell,  to  Sheridan,  to  Moore;  a  peacemaker  among  poets; 
a  friend  to  men  of  genius  and  children.  It  was  written  of  him 
by  one  of  his  guests :  '  I  suppose  there  is  hardly  any  hero  or 
man  of  genius  of  our  time,  from  Nelson  or  Crabbe  downwards, 
who  has  not  dined  at  Rogers'  table.'  He  loved  beauty,  and 
honoured  genius,  perhaps  beyond  any  man  of  his  time. 


CAROLINA,  LADY  NAIRNE  73 

HENRY  LUTTRELL   (1765-1851)  1 

Henry  Luttrell  was  described  by  Lady  Blessington  as  a 
talker  who  makes  one  think,  and  by  Byron  as  the  most  epi- 
grammatical  conversationalist  whom  he  had  ever  met.  No 
one,  said  Rogers  (of  whom  he  had  said  wickedly,  speaking 
of  his  'Italy/  that  it  would  have  dished  but  for  the  plates), 
could  stick  in  a  brilliant  thing  with  greater  readiness.  His 
'Advice  to  Julia'  and,  in  a  less  degree,  'Crockford  House' 
are  typical  of  the  intelligent  and  observant  man  about  town. 
The  Julia  letters  are  written  fluently,  and  respond  to  the 
motto  from  Rousseau:  'J'ai  vu  les  mceurs  de  mon  terns,  et 
j'ai  publie  cette  lettre.'  Luttrell's  brilliant  society  verses 
have  their  smaller  place  between  Gay  and  Praed,  perpetuating 
some  of  his  finest  qualities  as  a  wit  and  talker. 


CAROLINA,  LADY   NAIRNE    (1766-1845)  2 

Lady  Nairne  was  one  of  the  many  '  restorers '  of  old  Scot- 
tish songs.  She  began  by  writing  'words  suited  for  refined 
circles,'  which  were  to  replace  the  original  words  in  a  collec- 
tion of  national  airs,  called  '  The  Scottish  Minstrel,'  published 
in  six  volumes,  from  1S21  to  1824.  Her  admiration  of  Bums 
showed  itself  in  the  desire  to  publish  a  '  purified '  edition  of 
his  songs.  But  she  found  that  'some  of  his  greatest  efforts 
of  genius,'  having  'a  tendency  to  inflame  the  passions,' 
'would  n't  do,'  would  n't  be  purified,  that  is;  and  the  edition 
was  happily  abandoned.  How  far  her  desire  to  introduce 
'words  suited  for  refined  circles'  contributed  to  the  artistic 
bettering  of  the  songs  which  she  restored  may  remain  ques- 
tionable.   But  there  is  no  question  of  the  merit  of  her  own 

1  (1)  Lines  on  Ampthill  Park,  1819.    (2)  Advice  to  Julia,  a  letter  in 
Rhyme,  1820.    (3)  A  Letter  to  Julia,  1822.    (4)  Crockford  House,  1827. 

2  (1)  Lays  from  Strathearn,  1846.   (2)  Life  and  Songs,  1869. 


74   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

songs,  whose  authorship  she  concealed  during  the  main  part 
of  her  life.  Her  sense  of  form  was  generally  sure,  she  had  a 
firm  grasp  on  the  ballad-metre,  and  a  personal  originality,  in 
which  ready  humour  and  womanly  feeling  were  mingled. 
The  Jacobite  songs  are  rarely  without  a  light  gallop  of  their 
own;  there  is  a  delightful  sly  chuckle  in  'The  Laird  of  Cock- 
pen  ' ;  and  '  Caller  Herrin'/  the  best  of  all  her  songs,  is  a  sad 
and  gay  fisherwomen's  song  with  a  changing  rhythm  always 
in  tune.  The  most  famous  of  her  poems,  'The  Land  o'  the 
Leal/  is  the  expression  of  a  sentiment  verging  upon  senti- 
mentality; but  something,  perhaps  in  the  slow,  monotonous 
cadence  of  the  verse,  has  helped  to  keep  it  alive,  like  an  old 
tune  in  the  memory. 


ROBERT  BLOOMFIELD   (1766-1823)  1 

Robert  Bloomfield  was  born  at  Honington,  a  village  near 
Bury  St.  Edmunds,  on  December  3,  1766;  he  was  the  son  of  a 
tailor,  and  though  for  a  short  time  a  'farmer's  boy/  was  too 
sickly  for  the  work,  and  was  sent  to  work  at  tailoring  in  a 
London  garret.  '  The  Farmer's  Boy,'  written  in  another  garret 
after  his  marriage,  was  published  in  1800,  and  nearly  thirty 
thousand  copies  of  it  were  sold  in  three  years.  Bloomfield 
was  lionised,  patronised,  and  then  left  to  himself,  when,  says 
Mr.  Bullen  in  the  Dictionary  of  National  Biography,  'having 
now  become  hypochondriacal  and  half  blind,  he  retired  to 
Shefford,  where  he  died  in  great  poverty  on  19  August,  1823, 
leaving  a  widow  and  four  children.  Had  he  lived  longer  he 
would  probably  have  gone  mad.' 

When  Lamb  said  that  Bloomfield  had  '  a  poor  mind  '  he  has 
sometimes  been  taken  to  mean  no  more  than  a  rather  cruel 

1  (1)  The  Farmer's  Boy,  1800.  (2)  Rural  Tales,  Ballads  and  Songs, 
1802.  (3)  Good  Tidings  ;  or  News  from  the  Farm,  1804.  (4)  Wild  Flowers, 
1806.  (5)  The  Banks  of  the  Wye,  1811.  (6)  May-Day  with  the  Muses, 
1822.    (7)   Hazlewood  Hall;  a  Village  Drama,  1823.    (8)  Works,  1824. 


JOHN  HOOKHAM  FRERE  75 

pun.  But  the  epithet  is  strictly  just.  At  his  best  he  goes  no 
further  than  a  stiff  and  good-humoured  realism;  his  point  of 
view  is  anecdotal;  the  language  is  on  the  village  level  or  is 
strained  to  a  formal  fitness;  never  is  there  an  original  epithet. 
a  touch  of  illumination.  In  his  homely  ballads  he  uses  his 
material  in  the  strict  manner  of  prose,  getting  nothing  from 
his  form;  his  stories  never  go  beyond  triviality;  his  songs 
have  the  yokel's  simper.  Addressing  his  'old  oak  table/  he 
says  that  on  it 

'  I  poured  the  torrent  of  my  feelings  forth, 
Conscious  of  truth  in  Nature's  humble  track, 
And  wrote  "The  Farmer's  Boy"  upon  thy  back.' 

But  the  detail  of  'The  Farmer's  Boy/  which  is  copious,  is 
diluted  or  disguised  by  a  vague  acquired  manner,  which  tries 
to  give  a  traditional  turn  to  what  can  only  interest  us  if  it  is 
set  down  frankly,  as  Clare  set  it  down.  How  preferable  is 
Clare's 

'Hodge  whistling  at  the  fallow  plough' 

to  Bloomfield's  gibe :  — 

'His  heels  deep  sinking  every  step  he  goes, 
Till  dirt  adhesive  loads  his  clouted  shoes.' 

The  writer  of  those  lines  was  trying  to  write  elegantly. 


JOHN  HOOKHAM  FRERE   (1769-1846)  » 

John  Hookham  Frere  was  a  politician  and  scholar,  who,  in 
the  intervals  of  a  fastidious  and  unambitious  career,  found 
time  to  do  certain  poems  and  translations  of  an  unique  kind, 

1  (1)  Prospectus  and  Specimen  of  an  intended  National  Work,  by 
William  and  Robert  Whistlecraft,  of  Stowmarket  in  Suffolk,  Harness  and 
Collar  Makers,  2  vols.,  1817,  1818.  (2)  The  Monks  and  the  Giants  (same 
as  above),  1821.  (3)  Fables  for  Five-Year  Olds,  1830.  (4)  The  Frogs, 
1839.  (5)  Aristophanes,  a  Metrical  Version  of  the  Acharnians,  the 
Knights,  and  the  Birds,  1840.  (6)  Theognis  Restitutus,  1842.  (7) 
Psalms,  1848.    (8)  Works,  3  vols.,  1874. 


76   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

which  he  required  persuasion  even  to  publish.  He  wrote,  with 
Canning  in  1797-98  the  better  part  of  the  'Anti-Jacobin'; 
then,  still  anonymously,  in  1817  the  '  Prospectus  and  Specimen 
of  an  intended  National  Work,  by  William  and  Robert  Whistle- 
craft,  of  Stow-Market,  in  Suffolk,  harness  and  collar-makers, 
intended  to  comprise  the  most  interesting  particulars  relating 
to  King  Arthur  and  his  Round  Table/  afterwards  called  'The 
Monks  and  the  Giants' ;  and,  as  late  as  1831,  practically  for 
private  circulation,  the  first  part  of  his  translation  of  Aristo- 
phanes, done  ten  years  earlier.  A  translation  and  commentary 
on '  Theognis '  was  published  in  1845  to '  show  the  Germans  that 
an  Englishman  can  do  something,  though  not  exactly  in  their 
own  way.' 

As  lately  as  forty  years  ago,  an  American,  Mr.  Charles  Eliot 
Norton,  found  in  '  The  Monks  and  the  Giants '  '  one  of  the  most 
playful,  humorous,  and  original  poems  in  English,  a  perfect 
success  in  its  kind,  and  that  kind  one  of  the  rarest  and  most 
difficult.'  And  he  reports  to  us  Coleridge's  preference  for  the 
superior  metrical  skill  of  the  poem  as  compared  with  Byron's 
imitation  in  'Beppo.'  Perfect  technique  there  is,  and  a  well- 
bred  quality  of  pleasantry  which  is  perhaps  the  most  distin- 
guished kind  of  nonsense-making  that  we  have  had.  But  can  it 
be  read  to-day  with  anything  like  the  interest  with  which  we 
can  read  '  Beppo '  ?  To  compare  it  with  '  Don  Juan '  would  be 
out  of  the  question :  the  great  poem,  owing  the  origin  of  its 
form  to  him,  which  Frere  tried  to  suppress,  on  moral  grounds, 
before  publication.  Frere  tells  us  that  his  intention  was  to  in- 
troduce a  new  kind  of  burlesque  into  English,  using  the  stanza 
of  '  Morgante  Maggiore,'  which  had  lain  dormant  in  England 
since  the  Elizabethan  age,  and  had  never  been  used  then  for 
more  than  plain  narrative  purposes.  It  was  to  be  such  bur- 
lesque as  we  get  in  Sancho  Panza :  '  the  burlesque  treatment 
of  lofty  and  serious  subjects  by  a  thoroughly  common  but 
not  necessarily  low-minded  man  —  a  Suffolk  harness-maker.' 
Southey  rightly  defined  the  result  as  '  too  good  in  itself  and 


JOHN  HOOKHAM  FRERE  77 

too  inoffensive  to  become  popular;  for  it  attacked  nothing 
and  nobody.'  People  tried  to  find  a  meaning  in  it,  and  re- 
sented so  well-bred  and  generalised  a  joke.  It  has  indeed 
none  of  the  qualities  that  live,  and  has  become  an  instructive 
fossil.  It  did  what  new  and  perfect  technique  can  sometimes 
do:  it  set  a  fashion  in  poetry.  It  gave  Byron  exactly  the 
weapon  and  plaything  he  was  in  want  of.  '  Whistlecraft/  he 
wrote  in  1818,  'was  my  immediate  model ' ;  from  Whistlecraft 
he  turned  back  to  Berni,  and  from  Berni  to  'the  parent  of 
all  jocose  Italian  poetry/  Pulci.  But  when  he  took  the  form 
from  Frere  he  took  it  ready-made ;  he  had  only  to  fill  it  with 
his  own  energy  and  exuberance. 

Frere  was  one  of  the  scholars  of  letters  who  create  nothing 
for  themselves,  but  discover  many  things  for  others.  Having 
discovered  a  form  for  Byron,  and  invented,  with  Canning,  a 
scholarly  and  brilliant  manner  of  parody  in  the  '  Anti- Jacobin/ 
he  attempted  little  more  except  translation,  an  art  for  which  he 
was  peculiarly  fitted,  and,  as  it  was  his  nature  to  do,  the  trans- 
lation of  perhaps  the  most  difficult  of  all  poets  to  render, 
Aristophanes.  It  was  his  opinion  that  '  the  talent  and  attain- 
ments requisite  are  not  of  the  highest  order,  and  if  we  add  to 
these  a  natural  feeling  of  taste,  and  a  disposition  to  execute 
the  task,  with  the  degree  of  perfection  of  which  it  is  capable, 
it  should  seem,  that  little  else  would  be  requisite.'  It  is  with 
these  modest  words  that  he  anticipates  a  series  of  translations, 
interspersed  with  notes,  commentaries,  and  copious  stage- 
directions,  of  'the  half-divine  humourist,'  as  Mr.  Swinburne 
has  called  him,  'in  whose  incomparable  genius  the  highest 
qualities  of  Rabelais  were  fused  and  harmonised  with  the 
supremest  gifts  of  Shelley.'  Only  Mr.  Swinburne  himself,  in 
the  translation  of  the  chorus  of  Birds  to  which  these  words 
were  appended,  has  so  far  shown  us  the  possibility  of  going 
beyond  Frere's  sinuous  versatility  and  fine  speed  and  vivid 
fooling.  I  cannot  but  think  that  it  is  from  his  rhymes  that 
Barham  and  Gilbert  learnt  some  of  their  technique  of  nonsense- 


78   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

rhyming.  Few  translators  have  had  so  just  a  conception  of  the 
laws  of  that  delicate  and  sensitive  art,  which  he  has  defined  in 
these  words:  'The  language  of  translation  ought,  we  think, 
to  be  a  pure,  impalpable,  and  invisible  element,  the  medium 
of  thought  and  feeling,  and  nothing  more;  it  ought  never  to 
attract  attention  to  itself;  hence  all  phrases  that  are  remark- 
able in  themselves,  either  as  old  or  new,  are  as  far  as  possible 
to  be  avoided.'  Speech  and  rhythm  are  alike  brought  to  an 
extraordinary  flexibility,  the  blank  verse  really  doing,  with 
its  artful  crowdings  and  elisions,  precisely  that  familiar  service 
which  Leigh  Hunt  and  others  were  then  fumbling  after. 
The  hand  on  it  is  firm  enough  to  loosen  it  to  its  full  length ; 
it  never  strays  from  the  leash. 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH   (1770-1850)  x 

Sincerity  was  at  the  root  of  all  Wordsworth's  merits  and  de- 
fects ;  it  gave  him  his  unapproachable  fidelity  to  nature,  and 
also  his  intolerable  fidelity  to  his  own  whims.  Like  Emerson, 
whom  he  so  often  resembled,  he  respected  all  intuitions,  but, 
unlike  Emerson,  did  not  always  distinguish  between  a  whim 

1  (1)  An  Evening  Walk,  1793.  (2)  Descriptive  Sketches,  1793.  (3)  Lyri- 
cal Ballads,  with  a  few  other  Poems,  1798.  (4)  Lyrical  Poems,  with  other 
Poems,  2  vols.,  by  W.  Wordsworth,  1800.  (5)  Lyrical  Ballads,  with 
Pastoral  and  other  Poems,  2  vols.,  1802.  (6)  The  Excursion,  being  a  por- 
tion of  The  Recluse,  a  Poem,  1814.  (7)  Poems,  2  vols.,  1815.  (8)  The 
White  Doe  of  Rylstone;  or  The  Fate  of  the  Nortons,  1815.  (9)  Thanks- 
giving Ode,  1816.  (10)  Peter  Bell,  a  tale  in  verse,  1819.  (11)  The  Wag- 
goner, 1819.  (12)  The  River  Duddon,  a  Series  of  Sonnets :  Vaudracour  and 
Julia :  and  other  Poems,  1820.  (13)  The  Miscellaneous  Poems  of  William 
Wordsworth,  4  vols.,  1820.  (14)  Ecclesiastical  Sketches,  1822.  (15)  Poetical 
Works,  5  vols.,  1827.  (16)  Yarrow  Revisited,  1835.  (17)  Poetical  Works 
6  vols.,  1S36-37.  (18)  The  Sonnets  of  William  Wordsworth,  1838.  (19) 
Poems  chiefly  of  Early  and  Late  Years  ;  including  The  Borderers,  a  Trag- 
edy, 1842.  (20)  Ode,  performed  in  the  Senate  House,  Cambridge,  1847 
(21)  The  Prelude,  or  Growth  of  a  Poet's  Mind;  an  Autobiographical  Poem, 
1850.  (22)  The  Recluse  (posthumous),  188S.  (23)  Complete  Poetical 
Works,  1888. 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  79 

and  an  intuition.  His  life  was  spent  in  a  continual  meditation, 
and  his  attitude  towards  external  things  was  that  of  a  reflec- 
tive child,  continually  pondering  over  the  surprise  of  his  first 
impressions.  I  once  heard  Mr.  Aubrey  de  Vere,  who  had  been 
a  friend  of  Wordsworth  for  many  years,  say  that  the  frequent 
triviality  of  Wordsworth's  reflections  was  due  to  the  fact  that 
he  had  begun  life  without  any  of  the  received  opinions  which 
save  most  men  from  so  much  of  the  trouble  of  thinking ;  but 
had  found  out  for  himself  everything  that  he. name  to  believe 
or  to  be  conscious  of.  Thus  what  seems  to  most  men  an  ob- 
vious truism  not  worth  repeating,  because  they  have  never 
consciously  thought  it,  but  unconsciously  taken  it  on  trust,  was 
to  Wordsworth  a  discovery  of  his  own,  which  he  had  had  the 
happiness  of  taking  into  his  mind  as  freshly  as  if  he  had  been 
the  first  man  and  no  one  had  thought  about  life  before;  or, 
as  I  have  said,  with  the  delighted  wonder  of  the  child.  Real- 
ising early  what  value  there  might  be  to  him  in  so  direct  an 
inheritance  from  nature,  from  his  own  mind  at  its  first  grapple 
with  nature,  he  somewhat  deliberately  shut  himself  in  with 
himself,  rejecting  all  external  criticism ;  and  for  this  he  had  to 
pay  the  price  which  we  must  deduct  from  his  ultimate  gains. 
Wordsworth's  power  of  thought  was  never  on  the  level  of  his 
power  of  feeling,  and  he  was  wise,  at  least  in  his  knowledge  of 
himself,  when  he  said :  — 

'  One  impulse  from  a  vernal  wood 

May  teach  you  more  of  man, 
Of  moral  evil  and  of  good, 
Than  all  the  sages  can.' 

He  felt  instinctively,  and  his  feeling  was  nature's.  But 
thought,  coming  to  him  thus  immediately  as  it  did,  and  repre- 
senting the  thinking  part  of  himself  with  unparalleled  fidelity, 
spoke  out  of  an  intellect  by  no  means  so  responsive  to  the  finer 
promptings  of  that  supreme  intellectual  energy  of  which  we  are 
a  part.  It  is  thus  often  when  he  is  most  solemnly  satisfied  with 
himself  that  he  is  really  showing  us  his  weakness  most  ingenu- 


80   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ously :  he  would  listen  to  no  external  criticism,  and  there  was 
no  inherent  critical  faculty  to  stand  at  his  mind's  elbow  and 
remind  him  when  he  was  prophesying  in  the  divine  language 
and  when  he  was  babbling  like  the  village  idiot. 

Wordsworth  desired  to  lead  a  continuously  poetic  life,  and 
it  seemed  to  him  easy,  inevitable,  in  one  whose  life  was  a  con- 
tinual meditation.  It  seemed  to  him  that,  if  he  wrote  down  in 
verse  anything  which  came  into  hlsmind,  however  trivial,  it 
would  beeome  poetry  by  the  mere  contact.  His  titles  explain 
the  conviction.  Thus  the  beautiful  poem  beginning,  'It  is  the 
first  mild  day  of  March/  is  headed,  ^ro  my  Sister.  Written 
at  a  small  distance  from  my  house,  and  sent  by  my  little  boy.' 
In  its  bare  outline  it  is  really  a  note  written  down  under  the 
impulse  of  a  particular  moment,  and  it  says:  'Now  that  we 
have  finished  breakfast,  let  us  go  for  a  walk;  put  on  a  walking 
dress,  and  do  not  bring  a  book ;  it  is  a  beautiful  day,  and  we 
should  enjoy  it.'  Some  kindly  inspiration  helping,  the  rhymed 
letter  becomes  a  poem :  it  is  an  evocation  of  spring,  an  invoca- 
tion to  joy.  Later  on  in  the  day  Wordsworth  will  fancy  that 
something  else  in  his  mind  calls  for  expression,  and  he  will  sit 
down  and  write  it  in  verse.  There  it  will  be;  like  the  othejPT* 
it  will  say  exactly  what  he  wanted  to  say,  and  he  will  put  it  in 
its  place  among  his  poems  with  the  same  confidence.  But  this 
time  no  kindly  inspiration  will  have  come  to  his  aid ;  and  the 
thing  will  have  nothing  of  poetry  but  the  rhymes. 

What  Wordsworth's  poetic  life  lacked  was  energy,  and  he 
refused  to  recognise  that  no  amount  of  energy  will  suffice  for 
a  continual  production.  The  mind_Qf_C£leridge  worked  with 
extraordinary  energy,  seemed  to  be  always  at  high  thinking 
power,  but  Coleridge  has  left  us  less  finished  work  than  almost 
any  great  writer,  so  rare  was  it  with  him  to  be  able  faultlessly 
to  unite,  in  his  own  words, '  a  more  than  usual  state  of  emotion 
with  more  than  usual  order.'  Wordsworth  was  unconscious 
even  of  the  necessity,  or  at  least  of  the  part  played  by  skill  and 
patience  in  waiting  on  opportunity  as  it  comes,  and  seizing  it 


UNIVHHO!  ! 

WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  81 

as  it  goes.  When  one  has  said  that  he  wrote  instinctively, 
without  which  there  could  be  no  poetry,  one  must  add  that 
he  wrote  mechanically,  and  that  he  wrote  always.  Continual 
writing  is  really  a  bad  form  of  dissipation ;  it  drains  away  the 
very  marrow  of  the  brain.  Nature  is  not  to  be  treated  as  a 
handmaid  of  all  work,  and  requires  some  coaxing  before  she 
will  become  one's  mistress.  There  is  a  kind  of  unconscious 
personal  vanity  in  the  assumption  that  whatever  interests  or 
concerns  me,  however  slightly,  must  be  of  interest  to  all  the 
world.  Only  what  is  of  intense  interest  to  me,  or  concerns 
me  vitally,  will  be  of  interest  to  all  the  world;  and  Words- 
worth often  wrote  about  matters  which  had  not  had  time  to 
sink  into  him,  or  the  likelihood  of  taking  root  in  any  but  the 
upper  surface  of  his  mind.  / 

But  there  was  another  kind  of  forgetfulness  which  has  had 
almost  the  most  fatal  consequences  of  any.  Wordsworth  never 
rightly  apprehended  what  is  essential  in  the  difference  between 
prose  and  poetry.  Holding  rightly  that  poetry  can  be  a  kind 
of  religion,  he  admitted  what  Gautier  has  called  'the  heresy 
of  instruction.'  He  forgot  that  religion  has  its  sacred  ritual,  in 
*rhich  no  gesture  is  insignificant,  and  in  which  what  is  preached 
from  the  pulpit  is  by  no  means  of  higher  importance  than  what 
is  sung  or  prayed  before  the  altar.  He  laboured  to  make  his 
verse  worthy,  but  he  was  not  always  conscious  that  a  noble 
intention  does  not  of  itself  make  great  art.  In  '  The  Prelude ' 
he  tells  the  story  of  his  own  mind,  of  his  growth,  not  so  much 
as  a  man,  but  as  a  poet;  and  he  has  left  us  a jfocument. of 
value,  together  wjtMncidental  fragments  nf  finp.  pnp.try.  But 
it  is  not  a  poem,  because  what  Wordsworth -tried- to  do  was  a 
thing  which  should_have  been. .done. in-prose.  It  is  a  talking 
about  life,  not  a  creation  of  life  ;jtjs  a  jriticism  of  the  im agina- 
tion,  not  imagination  at  work  on  its  own  indefinable  ends. 

And  yet7ju3There,  ouFoTthis  unconsciousness  which  leaves 
him  so  often  at  the  mercy  of  all  intrusions,  clogged  by  fact, 
tied  to  scruple,  a  child  in  the  mischief-working  hands  of  his 


82      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

own  childishness,  we  come  upon  precisely  the  quality  which 
gives  him  his  least  questionable  greatness.  To  Wordsworth 
nothing  is  what  we  call ' poetry/  that  is,  a  fanciful  thing,  apart 
pom  reality;  he  is  not  sure  whether  even  the_jmjagi nation  is 
so  much  as  a  transfiguring,  or  only  an  unveiling^^Lnatural 
things.  Often  he  gives  you  the  thing  and  his  impressions  of 
the  thing,  and  then,  with  a  childlike  persistence  of  sincerity, 
his  own  doubt  as  to  the  precise  truth  of  the  thing.  Whether 
I  am  right.or^ro_ng.>.Ji£.^ays__to  us  gravely,  I  indeed  scarcely 
know ;  but  certainly  I  sawor  heard  this,  or  fancied  that  I  saw 
or  heard  it;  thus  what  I  am  telling  you  is,  to  me  at  least,  a 
reality.  It  is  thus  that,  as_Mjitthew  AnLQlgLhas  said  finely,  'it 
might  seem  that  nature  not  only  gave  him. the  matter  for  his 
poem,  but  wrote  his  poem  for  him.'  He  has  none  of  the  poet/s 
p'ride  in  his  own  invention,  only  a  confidence  in  the  voices 
that  he  has  heard  speaking  when  others  were  aware  of  nothing 
but  silence.  Thus  it  is  that  in  the  interpretation  of  natural 
things  he  can  be  absolutely  pellucid,  like  pure  light,  which 
renders  to  us  every  object  in  its  own  colours.  He  does  not 
'make  poetry '  out  of  these  things;  he  S£tsJJiem_iiQwnjust  as 
they  came  to  him.  It  is  the  fault  of  'Laodamia,'  and  of  some 
pieces  like  it,  that  there  Wordsworth  breaks  through  his  own 
wise  rule,  and  sets  himself  to  compose,. not.  taking  things  as 
they  come.   '  Laodajnj&J  J.a.iui.ati^  have 

those  classic  qualities  of  calmness  and  balance  and  natural 
dignity  which,  in  a  poem  like  '  The  Leech-Gatherer,'  had  come 
of  themselves,  through  mere  truth  to  nature,  to  the  humble- 
ness of  fact  and  the  grandeur  of  impassioned  thought  illumi- 
nating it.  Here,  on  the  contrary,  Wordsworth  would  be  Greets 
as  the  Greeks  were,  or  rather  as  they  seem  to  us,  at  our  dis 
tance  from  them,  to  be ;  and  it  is  only  in  single  lines  that  he 
succeeds,  all  the  rest  of  the  poem  showing  an  effort  to  be  some-j 
thing  not  himself.  Thus  this  profoundly  natural  poet  becomes; 
for  once,  as  Matthew  Arnold  has  noted,  'artificial,'  in  a  poenj 
which  has  been  classed  among  his  masterpieces. 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  83 

Ij^the_sonnets,  on  the  other  hand,  we  find  much  of  Words- 
worth's finest  work,  alike  in  substance  and  in  form.  'The 
sonnet's  scanty  plot  of  ground '  suited  him  so  well  because  it 
forced  him  to  be  at  once  concise  and  dignified^and  yet  allowed 
"■him  to  say  straight  out  the  particular  message  or  emotion 
which  was  possessing  him.  He  felt  that  a  form  so  circum- 
scribed demanded  not  only  something  said  in  every  line,  but 
something  said  with  a  certain  richness ;  that  when  so  few  words 
could  be  used,  those  words  must  be  chosen  with  unusual 
care,  and  with  an  attention  to  their  sound  as  well  as  to  their 
meaning.  The  proportion,  it  is  true,  of  his  bad  sonnets  to  his 
good  sonnets  is  so  great,  that,  even  in  Matthew  Arnold's  scru- 
pulous selection,  at  least  six  out  of  the  sixty  would  have  been 
better  omitted.  Taking  them  at  their  best,  you  will  find  that 
nowhere  in  his  work  has  he  put  so  much  of  his  finest  self  into 
so  narrow  a  compass.  ^.Nowhere  .are  there  so  many. splendid 
single  lines,  lines  of  such  weight,  such  imaginative  ardour. 
And  these  lines  have  nothing  to  lose  by  their  context,  as  \ 
almost  all  the  fine  lines-which  we  find-i-n-the  blank  verse  poems  ^ 
have  to.  lose. 

Wordsworth's  blank ^^yerse^s^o_imp.exfe.ct_.a f orm,  so  heavy, 
limp,  drawling,  unguided,  that  even  in  poems  like  'Tintern 
Abbey !  we  have  to  unravel  the  splendours,  and,  if  we  can, 
forget  the  rest.  In  '  The  Prelude '  and  '  The  Excursion '  poetry 
^  comes  and  goes  at  its  own  will,  and  even  then,  for  the  most 
part, 

'  Its  exterior  semblance  doth  belie 
Its  soul's  immensity/ 

What  goes  on  is  akind ,  pjjn  easi  i  red  Jtalk,  which,  if  one  is  in  the 
mood  for  it,  becomes  as  pleasant  as  the  gentle  continuance  of  a 
good,  thoughtful,  easy-paced,  prosy  friend.  Every now  and 
then  an  ecstasy  wakeg..Qut  of  it,  and  one  hears  singing,  as  if  the 
voices  of  all  the  birds  in  the  forest  cried  in  a  human  chorus. 

Wordsworth  has  told  us  in  his  famous  prefaces  exactly  what 
was  his  own  conception  of  poetry,  and  we  need  do  no  more 


84   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

than  judge  him  by  his  own  laws.  'Poetry/  he  says,  'is  the 
breath  and  finer  spirit  of  all  knowledge ;  it  is  the  impassioned 
expression  which  is  in  the  countenance  of  all  science.'  '  The 
poet  thinks  and  feels  in  the  spirit  of  human  passions.'  The 
poet  is  '  a  man  pleased  with  his  own  passions  and  volitions, 
and  who  rejoices  more  than  other  men  in  the  spirit  of  life  that 
is  in  him.'  '  I  have  said,'  he  reiterates,  'that  poetry  is  the  spon- 
taneous overflow  of  powerful  feelings ;  it  takes  its  origin  from 
emotion  recollected  in  tranquillity;  the  emotion  is  contem- 
plated till,  by  a  species  of  reaction,  the  tranquillity  gradu- 
ally disappears,  and  an  emotion  kindred  to  that  which  was 
before  the  subject  of  contemplation  is  gradually  produced,  and 
does  itself  actually  exist  in  the  mind.'  The  poet,  then,  deals 
with  'truth,  carried  alive  into  the  heart  by  passion.'  'I  have 
at  all  times,'  he  tells  us,  'endeavoured  to  look  steadily  at  my 
subject,'  and,  as  for  the  subject,  '  I  have  wished  to  keep  the 
reader  in  the  company  of  flesh  and  blood,  persuaded  that  by 
so  doing  I  shall  interest  him.'  'Personifications  of  abstract 
ideas  rarely  occur  in  these  volumes,  and  are  utterly  rejected 
as  an  ordinary  device  to  elevate  the  style  and  raise  it  above 
prose.'  'Poetic  diction/  which  is  always  insincere,  inasmuch 
as  it  is  not  'the  real  language  of  men  in  any  situation'  is  to  be 
given  up,  and,  'it  may  safely  be  affirmed  that  there  neither 
is,  nor  can  be,  any  essential  difference  between  the  language 
of  prose  and  metrical  composition.'  The  language  which  alone 
is  suitable  for  verse,  and  which  requires  no  change  in  its  trans- 
ference from  the  lips  of  men  to  the  printed  page,  is  denned, 
not  very  happily,  in  the  original  preface  of  1798,  as  'the  lan- 
guage of  conversation  in  the  middle  and  lower  classes  of  soci- 
ety/ and,  in  the  revised  preface  of  1800,  with  perfect  exacti- 
tude, as  '  a  selection  of  the  real  language  of  men  in  a  state  of 
vivid  sensation.' 

When  these  true,  but  to  us  almost  self-evident  things  were 
said,  Wordsworth  was  daring,  for  the  first  time,  to  say  what 
others,  when  they  did  it,  had  done  without  knowing;  and  he 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  85 

was  supposed  to  be  trying  to  revolutionise  the  whole  art  of 
poetry.  In  reality,  he  was  bringing  poetry  back  to  its  senses, 
which  it  had  temporarily  lost  under  the  influence  of  that  lucid 
madness  which  Pope  imposed  upon  it.  The  style  of  Pope  was 
still  looked  upon  as  the  type  of  poetical  style,  though  Blake 
and  Burns  had  shown  that  the  utmost  rapture  of  personal 
passion  and  of  imaginative  vision  could  be  expressed,  even 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  in  a  style  which  was  the  direct 
utterance  of  Nature  in  her  two  deepest  moods.  Pope  is  the 
most  finished  artist  in  prose  who  ever  wrote  in  verse.  It  is 
impossible  to  read  him  without  continuous  admiration  for  his 
cleverness,  or  to  forget,  while  reading  him,  that  poetry  cannot 
be  clever.  While  Herrick  or  Crashaw,  with  two  instinctively 
singing  lines,  lets  us  overhear  that  he  is  a  poet,  Pope  brilliantly 
convinces  us  of  everything  that  he  chooses,  except  of  that  one 
fact.  The  only  moments  when  he  trespasses  into  beauty  are 
the  moments  when  he  mocks  its  affectations ;  so  that 

'Die  of  a  rose  in  aromatic  pain' 

remains  his  homage,  unintentional  under  its  irony,  to  that 
'  principle  of  beauty  in  all  things '  which  he  had  never  seen. 

But  it  was  not  only  against  the  directly  anti-poetical  prin- 
ciples of  Pope  that  Wordsworth  protested,  but  against  much 
that  was  most  opposed  to  it,  against  the  hyperbolical  exaggera- 
tions of  the  so-called  'metaphysical  poets '  of  the  seventeenth 
century,  and  against  the  half-hearted  and  sometimes  ill- 
directed  attempts  of  those  who,  in  a  first  movement  of  reac- 
tion against  Pope,  were  trying  to  bring  poetry  back  to  nature, 
against  Thomson,  Cowper,  and  Crabbe.  He  saw  that  Thom- 
son, trying  to  see  the  world  with  his  own  eyes,  had  only  to 
some  degree  won  back  the  forgotten  '  art  of  seeing/  and  that, 
even  when  he  saw  straight,  he  could  not  get  rid  of  that 
1  vicious  style  '  which  prevented  him  from  putting  down  what 
he  had  seen,  just  as  he  saw  it.  Cowper's  style  is  mean,  rather 
than  vicious;  'some  critics/  says  Wordsworth,  after  quoting 


86      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

some  lines  from  a  poem  of  Cowper,  then  and  afterwards  popu- 
lar, 'would  call  the  language  prosaic;  the  fact  is,  it  would  be 
bad  prose,  so  bad  that  it  is  scarcely  worse  in  metre.'  With 
Crabbe,  who  may  have  taught  Wordsworth  something,  we 
have  only  to  contrast,  as  the  note  to  'Lucy  Gray'  asks  us  to 
do,  'the  imaginative  influences  which  [Wordsworth]  endea- 
voured to  throw  over  common  life  with  Crabbe's  matter-of- 
fact  style  of  handling  subjects  of  the  kind.'  For,  seeming,  as 
Wordsworth  did  to  the  critics  of  his  time,  to  bring  poetry  so 
close  to  prose,  to  make  of  it  something  prosaic,  he  is  really, 
if  we  will  take  him  at  his  word,  and  will  also  judge  him  by  his 
best,  the  advocate  of  a  more  than  usually  lofty  view  of  poetry. 
In  saying  that  there  is  no  essential  difference  between  the 
language  of  prose  and  of  verse,  Wordsworth  is  pointing 
straight  to  what  "constitutes  the  essential  difference  between 
prose  and  poetry:  metre.  An  old  delusion  reappeared  the 
other  day,  when  a  learned  writer  on  aesthetics  quoted  from 
Marlowe :  — 

'Was  this  the  face  that  launched  a  thousand  ships, 
And  burned  the  topless  towers  of  Ilium?' 

and  assured  us  that '  it  is  certain  that  he  could  only  have  ven- 
tured  on  the  sublime  audacity  of  saying  that  a  face  launched 
ships  and  burned  towers  by  escaping  from  the  limits  of  ordi- 
nary language,  and  conveying  his  metaphor  through  the 
harmonious  and  ecstatic  movements  of  rhythm  and  metre.' 
Now,  on  the  contrary,  any  writer  of  elevated  prose,  Milton 
or  Ruskin,  could  have  said  in  prose  precisely  what  Marlowe 
said,  and  made  fine  prose  of  it;  the  imagination,  the  idea,  a 
fine  kind  of  form,  would  have  been  there;  only  one  thing 
would  have  been  lacking,  the  very  finest  kind  of  form,  the 
form  of  verse.  It  would  have  been  poetical  substance,  not 
poetry;  the  rhythm  transforms  it  into  poetry,  and  nothing 
but  the  rhythm. 

When  Wordsworth  says '  that  the  language  of  a  large  portion 
of  every  good  poem,  even  of  the  most  elevated  character,  must 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  87 

necessarily,  except  with  reference  to  the  metre,  in  no  respect 
differ  from  that  of  good  prose/  he  is  admitting,  on  behalf 
of  metre,  all  that  any  reasonable  defender  of  'art  for  art's 
sake '  ever  claimed  on  its  behalf.  But  he  is  not  always,  or  not 
clearly,  aware  of  the  full  meaning  of  his  own  argument,  and 
not  always  consistent  with  it.  He  is  apt  to  fall  back  on  the 
conventional  nicety  of  the  worst  writers  whom  he  condemns, 
and  can  speak  of 

'  The  fowl  domestic  and  the  household  dog,' 

or  can  call  a  gun  '  the  deadly  tube/  or  can  say  of  the  organ, 

'While  the  tubed  engine  feels  the  inspiring  blast.' 

He  is  frequently  provincial  in  thought,  and  thus  trivial  in 
expression,  as  when  he  says  with  conviction :  — 

'  Alas !  that  such  perverted  zeal 
Should  spread  on  Britain's  favoured  ground.' 

He  can  be  trivial  for  so  many  reasons,  one  of  which  is  a  false 
theory  of  simplicity,  not  less  than  a  lack  of  humour. 

'  My  little  Edward,  say  why  so ; 
My  little  Edward,  tell  me  why,' 

is  the  language  of  a  child,  not  of  a  grown  man;  and  when 
Wordsworth  uses  it  in  his  own  person,  even  when  he  is  sup- 
posed to  be  speaking  to  a  child,  he  is  not  using  '  the  real  lan- 
guage of  men/  but  the  actual  language  of  children.  The  rea- 
son why  a  fine  poem  like  'The  Beggars '  falls  so  immeasurably 
below  a  poem  like  '  The  Leech-Gatherer '  is  because  it  has  in  it 
something  of  this  infantile  quality  of  speech.  I  have  said  that 
Wordsworth  had  a  quality  of  mind  which  was  akin  to  the 
cmTcPs  fresh  and  wondering- apprehension  of  things.  But  he 
was  not  content  with  using  this  faculty  like  a  man ;  it  dragged 
him  into  the  depths  of  a  second. .childhood  hardly  to  be  dis- 
tinguished from  literal  imbecility.  In  a  famous  poem, '  Simon 
Lee/  he  writes:  — 


88   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'  My  gentle  reader,  I  perceive 

How  patiently  you've  waited; 
And  now  I  fear  that  you  expect 
Some  tale  will  be  related.' 

There  are  more  lines  of  the  kind,  and  they  occur,  as  you  see, 
in  what  is  considered  one  of  Wordsworth's  successes.  If  one 
quoted  from  one  of  the  failures ! 

It  was  from  Burns,  partly,  that  Wordsworth  learnt  to  be 
absolutely  straightforward  in  saying  what  he  had  to  say, 
and  it  is  from  Burns  that  he  sometimes  even  takes  his  metres, 
as  in  the  two  fine  poems  written  in  his  memory. 

1  Well  might  I  mourn  that  He  was  gone 
Whose  light  I  hailed  when  first  it  shone, 
When,  breaking  forth  as  nature's  own, 

It  showed  my  youth 
How  Verse  may  build  a  princely  throne 
On  humble  truth.' 

That  has  the  very  quality  of  Burns,  in  its  admission  of  a  debt 
which  is  more  obvious  than  any  other,  except  that  general 
quickening  of  poetic  sensibility,  of  what  was  sometimes  slug- 
gish in  his  intellect,  which  he  owed  to  Coleridge,  and  that 
quickening  of  the  gift  of  seeing  with  emotion,  which  he  owed 
to  his  sister  Dorothy.  But,  at  his  best  and  worst,  hardly  any 
poet  seems  so  much  himself,  so  untouched  by  the  influence 
of  other  poets.  When  he  speaks  he  is  really  speaking,  and  when 
speech  passes  into  song,  as  in  some  of  those  happy  lyrics  which 
preserve  a  gravity  in  delight,  the  words  seem  to  sing  them- 
selves unconsciously,  to  the  tune  of  their  own  being.  In  what 
seems  to  me  his  greatest,  as  it  is  certainly  his  most  charac- 
teristic poem,  'The  Leech-Gatherer,'  he  has  gathered  up  all 
his  qualities,  dignity,  homeliness,  meditation  over  man' and 
nature,  respectful  pity  for  old  age  and  poverty,  detailed  obser- 
vation of  natural  things,  together  with  an  imaginative  atmos-  . 
phere  which  melts,  harmonises,  the  forms  of  cloud  and  rock 
and  pool  and  the  voices  of  wind  and  man  into  a  single  com- 
position. Such  concentration,  with  him,  is  rare ;  but  it  is  much 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  89 

less  rare  than  is  commonly  supposed  to  find  an  almost  perfect 
expression  of  a  single  mood  or  a  single  aspect  of  nature,  as  it 
has  come  to  him  in  his  search  after  everything  that  nature  has 
to  say  to  us  or  to  show  us. 

In  Haydon's  portrait,  the  portrait  by  which  Wordsworth  is 
generally  known,  the  eyes  and  the  forehead  seem  to  be  listening, 
and  the  whole  head  droops  over,  as  if  brooding  upon  some 
memory  of  sound  or  sight.  It  is  typical  of  a  poet  who,  at  his 
best,  had  a  Quaker  wisdom,  and  waited  on  the  silent  voices 
'in  a  wise  passiveness,'  with  that  'happy  stillness  of  the  mind ' 
in  which  truth  may  be  received  unsought.  For,  as  he  says, 
summing  up  into  a  kind  of  precept  what  nearly  all  of  his  work 
represents  to  us  indirectly :  — 

'  The  eye  —  it  cannot  choose  but  see ; 

We  cannot  bid  the  ear  be  still ; 
Our  bodies  feel,  where'er  they  be, 
Against,  or  with  our  will. 

'  Nor  less  I  deem  that  there  are  Powers 

Which  of  themselves  our  minds  impress ; 
That  we  can  feed  this  mind  of  ours 
In  a  wise  passiveness. 

'  Think  you,  'mid  all  this  mighty  sum 

Of  things  for  ever  speaking, 
That  nothing  of  itself  will  come 

But  we  must  still  be  seeking  ? ' 

And,  in  'T^.Prelude/  defining  what  he 
poet,  it  is_ 

'  A  privilege  whereby  a  work  of  his 
Proceeding  from  a  source  of  untaught  things, 
Creative  and  enduring,  may  become. 
A  force  like  one  of  Nature's.' 


^o  see,  more  clearly  than  any  one  had,  seen-before,  seeing  things 
as  they  are,  not  composed  into  pictures,  but  in  splendid  natural 
motion  or  in  all  the  ardour  of  repose ;  and  then  to  see  deeply 
into  them,  to  feel  them, 


90   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'not  as  in  the  hour 
Of  thoughtless  youth,  but  hearing  oftentimes 
The  still,  sad  music  of  humanity*! 


that  is  his  aim,  his  ambition.  In  the  note  to  a  very  early  poem 
he  tells  us  of  some  natural  aspect  that  struck  him  in  boyhood : 
'  It  was  in  the  way  between  Hawkshead  and  Ambleside,  and 
gave  me  extreme  pleasure.  The  moment/  he  adds,  'was  im- 
portant in  my  poetical  history,  for  I  date  from  it  my  conscious- 
ness of  the  infinite  variety  of  natural  appearances  which  had 
been  unnoticed  by  the  poets  of  any  age  or  country,  so  far  as  I 
was  acquainted  with  them ;  and  I  made  a  resolution  to  supply, 
in  some  degree,  the  deficiency. '  It  was  only  gradually  that 
the  human  figures  came  into  the  landscape,  and  at  first  as  no 
more  than  a  completion  to  the  picture.  He  sees  the  Cumber- 
land shepherd  like  one  'in  his  own  domain/  among  the  rocks, 
and  outlined  against  the  sky :  — 

'  Thus  was  man 
Ennobled  outwardly  before  my  sight, 
And  thus  my  heart  was  early  introduced 
To  an  unconscious  love  and  reverence 
Of  human  nature' : 

still  visual,  you  see,  part  of  the  honour  and  majesty  of  the 
eyes;  and  still  secondary  to  nature:  — 

'a  passion,  she, 
A  rapture  often,  and  immediate  love 
Ever  at  hand;  he,  only  a  delight 
Occasional,  an  accidental  grace, 
His  hour  being  not  yet  come.' 

The  hour  came  with  a  consciousness,  henceforward  deeply,  but 
not  passionately,  felt,  with  a  moved,  grave,  pitying  and  re- 
spectful, but  not  passionate,  sympathy  with  passion,  of 

'Man  suffering  among  awful  Powers  and  Forms.' 

When  Wordsworth  resolved  to 

'  make  verse 
Deal  boldly  with  substantial  things,' 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  91 

he  turned,  somewhat  apprehensively,  to  what  he  feared  and 
valued  most  in  humanity,  the  elementary  passions,  and  to  those 
in  whom  they  are  seen  most  simply,  the  peasants  of  his  country- 
side.  It  was 

'  the  gentle  agency 
Of  natural  objects' 

that  had  led  him  gradually  to  feel  for  passions  not  his  own,  and 
to  think 

1  On  man,  the  heart  of  man,  and  human  life.' 

And  so  these  '  dwellers  in  the  valley '  come  to  us  with  some 
of  the  immobility  of  natural  objects,  set  there  among  their 
rocks  and  stones  like  a  part  of  them,  scarcely  more  sentient, 
or  scarcely  less  interpenetrated  with  the  unconscious  lesson 
of  nature.  They  are  stationary,  a  growth  of  the  soil,  and  when 
they  speak,  with  the  emphatic  slowness  of  the  peasant,  we  are 
almost  surprised  that  beings  so  rudimentary  can  become 
articulate. 

'Words  are  but  under-agents  in  their  souls; 
When  they  are  grasping  with  their  greatest  strength 
They  do  not  breathe  among  them.' 

There  is  something  sluggish,  only  half  awake,  in  the  way 
'  Michael !  is  told :  — 

'  'TJs  a  common  tale, 
An  ordinary  sorrow  of  man's  life' ; 

and  it  is  seen  as  if  with  the  eyes  of  lhe.JpJd.manj  and  told  as  if 
always  with  hisqwn  speech.  Turn  to  those  poems  in  which 
Wordsworth  is  most  human,  and  at  the  same  time  most  him- 
self as  a  poet, '  The  Leech-Gatherer,' '  Michael/  \  Animal  Tran- 
quillity and  Decay,'  'The  Old  Cumberland  Beggar,'  and  you 
will  see  that  they  are  all  mqtionleaa^QCJiaQyitig imperceptibly, 
like  the  old  beggar :  — 

'  He  is  so  still 
In  look  and  motion,  that  the  cottage  curs, 
Ere  he  have  passed  the  door,  will  turn  away, 
Weary  of  barking  at  him.' 


92      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

And  Wordsworth  convejs.this  part  of  natural  truth  to  us  as  no 
other  poet  has  ever  done,  no  other  poet  having  had  in  him  so 
much  of  the  reflective  peasant.  He  seems  to  stop  on  the  other 
side  of  conscious  life,  and  I  think  we  may  apply  to  his  general 
attitude  towards  the  human  comedy  what  he  says  in  'The 
Prelude !  of  his  attitude  towards  a  play  on  the  stage :  — 

'  For  though  I  was  most  passionately  moved 
And  yielded  to  all  changes  of  the  scene 
With  an  obsequious  promptness,  yet  the  storm 
Passed  not  beyond  the  suburbs  of  the  mind.' 

In  one  of  his  poems  Wordsworth  rebukes  Byron  because  he 

1  dares  to  take 
Life's  rule  from  passion  craved  for  passion's  sake ' ; 

and,  in  an  utterance  reported  in  Mr.  Myers'  Life,  takes  credit 
to  himself  for  his  moderation,  in  words  which  can  hardly  be 
read  without  a  smile :  '  Had  I  been  a  writer  of  love-poetry,  it 
would  have  been  natural  to  me  to  write  it  with  a  degree  of 
warmth  which  could  hardly  have  been  approved  by  my  prin- 
ciples, and  which  might  have  been  undesirable  for  the  reader.' 
Not  unnaturally,  Wordsworth  was  anxious  for  it  to  be  sup- 
posed that  he  had  not  attained  tranquillity  without  a  struggle, 
and  we  hear  much,  from  himself  and  others,  of  his  restlessness, 
which  sent  him  wandering  about  the  mountains  alone,  of  his 
nervous  exhaustion  after  writing,  of  his  violence  of  feeling,  the 
feeling  for  his  sister,  for  instance,  which  seems  to  have  been 
the  one  strong  and  penetrating  affection  of  his  life.  Were 
not  these  stirrings,  after  all,  no  more  than  breaths  of  passing 
wind  ruffling  the  surface  of  a  deep  and  calm  lake?  I  think 
almost  the  most  significant  story  told  of  Wordsworth  is  the 
one  reported  by  Mr.  Aubrey  de  Vere  about  the  death  of  his 
children.  'Referring  once,'  he  tells  us,  'to  two  young  children 
of  his  who  had  died  about  forty  years  previously,  he  described 
the  details  of  their  illnesses  with  an  exactness  and  an  impetuos- 
ity of  troubled  excitement,  such  as  might  have  been  expected 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  93 

if  the  bereavement  had  taken  place  but  a  few  weeks  before. 
The  lapse  of  time  seemed  to  have  left  the  sorrow  submerged 
indeed,  but  still  in  all  its  first  freshness.  Yet  I  afterwards 
heard  that  at  the  time  of  the  illness,  at  least  in  the  case  of  one 
of  the  two  children,  it  was  impossible  to  rouse  his  attention 
to  the  danger.  He  chanced  to  be  then  under  the  immediate 
spell  of  one  of  those  fits  of  poetic  inspiration  which  descended 
on  him  like  a  cloud.  Till  the  cloud  had  drifted,  he  could  see 
nothing  beyond.'  The  thing  itself,  that  is  to  say,  meant  little 
to  him:  he  could  not  realise  it;  what  possessed  him  was  the 
'emotion  recollected  in  tranquillity/  the  thing  as  it  found  its 
way,  imaginatively,  into  his  own  mind. 

And  it  was  this  large,_  calm,  impersonal  power,  this  form 
of  imagination,  which,  as  he  says,  — 

'  Is  but  another  name  for  absolute  power 
And  clearest  insight,  amplitude  of  mind, 
And  Reason  in  her  most  exalted  mood/ 

which  made  him  able  to 

'Sit  without  emotion,  hope,  or  aim, 
In  the  loved  presence  of  his  cottage  fire,' 

and  yet  to  look  widely,  dispassionately,  into  what  in  man  is 
most  akin  to  nature,  seeing  the  passions  almost  at  their  origin, 
where  they  are  still  a  scarcely  conscious  part  of  nature.  Speak- 
ing of  his.  feeling  for  nature,  he  tells  us  that, 

'As  if  awakened,  summoned,  roused,  constrained, 
I  looked  for  universal  things,  perused 
The  common  countenance  of  earth  and  sky.' 

And  so,  in  his  reading  of  '  the  great  Jbook  of  the  world/  of  what 
we  call  the  human  interest  of  it,  he  looked  equally,  and  with 
the  same  sense  of  a  constraining  finger  pointing  along  the  lines, 
for  universal  things. 

'  Him  who  looks 
In  steadiness,  who  hath  among  least  tilings 
An  under-sense  of  greatest ;  sees  the  parts 
As  parts,  but  with  a  feeling  of  the  whole,' 


94      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

is  his  definition  of  what  he  has  aimed  at  doing :  it  defines  ex- 
actly what  he  has  done.  The  links  of  things  as  their  roots 
begin  to  form  in  the  soil,  their  close  intertexture  under- 
ground :  that  is  what  he  shows  us,  completing  his  interpreta- 
tion of  nature.  We  must  go  to  other  poets  for  any  vivid  con- 
sciousness or  representation  of  all  that  waves  in  the  wind  when 
sap  and  fibre  become  aware  of  themselves  above  ground. 
All  Wordsworth's  work  is  a  search  after 

'  The  bond  of  union  between  life  and  joy.' 

The  word  joyqccurs  in  hisjffiDGdc.moEe-ixequen.tly  than  perhaps 
any  other  emotional  word.  Sometimes,  as  in  his  own  famous 
and  awkward  line,  it  is 

'Of  joy  in  widest  commonalty  spread' 

that  he  tells  us;  sometimes  of  the  joy  embodied  in  natural 
things,  as  they  are  taken  in  gratefully  by  the  senses;  some- 
times of  disembodied  joy,  an  emotion  of  the  intellect :  — 

'  And  I  have  felt 
A  presence  that  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 
Of  elevated  thought ;  a  sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 
Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns, 
And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air, 
And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man.' 

Ecstasy,  with  him,  is 

'The  depth,  and  not  the  tumult,  of  the  soul'; 

and  his  highe,sk. iQy__comes  to  him  in  a-sacramental  silence. 
Even  at  this  height,  any  excess  of  joy  seems  to  him  so  natural, 
that  he  can  speak  of  it  quite  simply,  without  any  of  the  un- 
faith  of  rhetoric. 

To  Wordsworth  .there  was  an  actual  divine -inhabitant  o£ 
woods  and  rocks,  a  divinity  implicit  there,  whom  we  had  only 
to  open  our  eyes  to  see,  visible  in  every  leaf  and  cranny.  What 
with  other  men  is  a  fancy,  or  at  the  most  a  difficult  act  of 
faith,  is  with  him  the  mere  statement  of  a  fact.   While  other 


WILLIAM  WORDSWORTH  95 

men  search  among  the  images  of  the  mind  for  that  poetry 
which  they  would  impute  to  nature,  Wordsworth  finds  it 
there,  really  in  things,  and  awaiting  only  a  quiet,  loving 
glance.  He  conceives  of  things  as  loving  back  in  return  for 
man's  love,  grieving  at  his  departure,  never  themselves  again 
as  they  had  been  when  he  loved  them.  'We  die,  my  friend/ 
says  the  Wanderer,  looking  round  on  the  cottage  which  had 
once  been  Margaret's; 

'  Nor  we  alone,  but  that  which  each  man  loved 
And  prized  in  his  particular  nook  of  earth 
Dies  with  him,  or  is  changed.' 

Even  the  spring  in  the  garden  seems  conscious  of  a  grief  in 

things. 

'Beside  yon  spring  I  stood, 
And  eyed  its  waters  till  we  seemed  to  feel 
One  sadness,  they  and  I.  For  them  a  bond 
Of  brotherhood  is  broken :  time  has  been 
When,  every  day,  the  touch  of  human  hand 
Dislodged  the  natural  sleep  that  binds  them  up 
In  mortal  stillness ;  and  they  ministered 
To  human  comfort.' 

What  a  responsiveness  of  the  soul  to  the  eye,  'the  most 
despotic  of  our  senses,'  the  sense  of  sight,  as  he  calls  it.  truly! 
It  isjiis  chief  reason  for  discontentment  with  cities,  that  in 
them  the  eye  is  starved,  to  the  disabling  or  stunting  of  the 
growth  of  the  heart :  — 

'  Among  the  alnscL_anrl  r>yprrrrvnrrlpf|  haunts 

Of  cities,  where  the  human  heart  is  sick, 
And  the  eye  feeds  it  not,  and  cannot  feed.' 

The  eyeis~realised  by  him  as  the  chief  influence  for  good  in  the 
world,  an  actual  moral  impulse,  in  its  creation  and  radiation  of 
delighTr Bight,  to  Him,  is  feeling;  not,  as  it  is  with  Keats,  a 
voluptuous  luxury,  but  with  some  of  the  astringent  quality 
of  mountain  air.  When  he  says  that  the  valley  'swarms  with 
sensation,'  it  is  because,  as  he  tells  us  of  one  living  among  the 
Lakes,  'he  must  have  experienced,  while  looking  on  the  un- 


96   ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ruffled  waters,  that  the  imagination  by  their  aid  is  carried  into 
recesses  of  feeling  otherwise  impenetrable.'  It  is  into  these 
recesses  of  feeling  that  the  mere  physical  delight  of  the  eye 
carries  him,  and,  the  visible  world  so  definitely  apprehended, 
the  feeling  latent  in  it  so  vividly  absorbed,  he  takes  the  further 
step,  and  begins  to  make  and  unmake  the  world  about  him. 

'  I  had  a  world  about  me  —  't  was  my  own, 
I  made  it,  for  it  only  lived  to  me.' 

The  Beatific  Vision  has  come  to  him  in  this  tangible,  embodied 
form,  through  a  kind  of  religion  of  the  eye  which  seems  to 
attain  its  final  rapture,  unlike  most  forms  of  mysticism,  with 
open  eyes.  The  tranquillity,  which  he  reached  in  that  con- 
sciousness of 

'  A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 
All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thought, 
And  rolls  through  all  things,' 

is  his  own  form  of  perfect  spiritual  happiness,  or  attainment. 
That  'impassioned  contemplation  '  of  nature,  which  he  prized 
above  all  things,  was  his  way  of  closing  the  senses  to  all  things 
external  to  his  own  contemplation.  It  came  to  him  through 
sight,  but  through  sight  humanised  into  feeling,  and  illumi- 
nated by  joy  and  peace.  He  saw  nature  purely,  with  no  un- 
easy or  unworthy  emotions,  which  nature  might  need  to 
purify.  Nature  may,  indeed,  do  much  to  purify  the  soul  of 
these  emotions,  but  until  these  are  at  rest  it  cannot  enter  fully, 
it  cannot  possess  the  soul  with  itself.  The  ultimate  joy,  as 
Wordsworth  knew,  that  comes  to  ihe...soul  from  the  beauty 
of  the  world,  must  enter  as  light  enters  a  crystal,  finding  its 
own  home  there  and  its  own  flawless  mirror. 

Yet,  as  there  is  an  ecstasy  in  which  joy  itself  loses  so  much 
of  separateness  as  to  know  that  it  is  joy,  so  there  is  one  further 
step  which  we  may  take  in  the  companionship  of  nature ;  and 
this  step  Wordsworth  took.  In  the  note  to  that  ode  into  which 
he  has  put  his  secret  doctrine,  the '  Intimations  of  Immortality 


JAMES   HOGG  97 

from  Recollections  of  Early  Childhood/  he  says,  speaking  of 
his  early  years : '  I  was  often  unable  to  think  of  external  things 
as  having  external  existence,  and  I  communed  with  all  that  I 
saw  as  something  not  apart  from,  but  inherent  in,  my  own 
immaterial  nature.  Many  times  while  going  to  school  have  I 
grasped  at  a  wall  or  tree  to  recall  myself  from  this  abyss  of 
idealism  to  the  reality.'  To  Wordsworth,  externa,! ...things. ... 
existed  so  visibly^  just Jbecjmse  they  had  no  existence  apart 
from  the  one  eternal  and  infinitebejng ;  it  was  for  the  principle 
of  infinity  in  them  that  he  loved  them,  and  it  was  this  prin- 
ciple of  infinity  which  he  seemed  to  recognise  by  a  simple  act 
of  memory.  It  seemed  to  him,  quite  literally,  that  the  child 
really  remembers  'that  imperial  palace  whence  we  came'; 
less  and  less  clearly  as  human  life  sets  all  its  veils  between  the 
soul  and  that  relapsing  light.  But,  later  on,  when  we  seem  to 
have  forgotten,  when  the  world  is  most  real  to  us,  it  is  by  an 
actual  recognition  that  we  are  reminded,  now  and  again,  as  one 
of  those  inexplicable  flashes  carries  some  familiar,  and  cer- 
tainly never  seen,  vision  through  the  eyes  to  the  soul,  of  that 
other,  previous  fragment  of  eternity  which  the  soul  has  known 
before  it  accepted  the  comfortable  bondage  and  limit  of  time,  j  . 
And^so,  finally^Jhe-SQul,  carried  by  nature  through  nature,  *-~~ 
transported  by  visible  beauty  intojhe j)jresence_of  the  source 
of  invisible  beauty,  sees,  inone  annihilating  flash  of  memory, 
its  own  separate  identity  vanish  away,  to  resume  the  infinite 
existence  which  that  identity  haTlDuTmterrupted. 


JAMES  HOGG   (1770-1835)  » 

James  Hogg,  better  known  as  the  Ettrick  Shepherd,  began 
to  work  for  his  living  at  the  age  of  seven,  by  herding  cows  on 
the  hills  of  Selkirk;  his  wages  for  the  half  year  being  a  ewe 

1  (1)  Donald  McDonald,  patriotic  song,  1800.     (2)  Scottish  Pastorals, 
1801.     (3)  The  Mountain  Bard,  1807.     (4)  The  Forest  Minstrel,  1810. 


98      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

lamb  and  a  pair  of  shoes.  At  twenty  he  could  not  write  all  the 
letters  of  the  alphabet;  at  twenty-six,  after  reading  many 
books,  he  began  to  make  up  verses  in  his  head,  which  he  wrote 
down  slowly, '  four  or  six  lines  at  a  sitting/  on  sheets  of  paper 
which  he  had  stitched  together  and  carried  in  his  pocket, 
sitting  on  the  hillside  with  his  unruly  sheep  about  him.  In 
the  following  year,  1797,  he  first  heard  of  Burns,  who  had  just 
died ;  a  half -daft  man  came  to  him  on  the  hill,  and  repeated 
'  Tarn  o'  Shanter/  which  he  got  by  heart.  The  half-daft  man 
told  him  that  it  had  been  made  by  a  ploughman  called  Robert 
Burns,  and  that  he  was  the  sweetest  poet  who  ever  lived,  and 
that  he  was  dead  now,  and  his  place  would  never  be  filled. 
Hogg  thought  deeply  of  the  matter,  and  resolved  to  be  a  poet, 
and  to  fill  Burns'  place  in  the  world. 

His  first  songs  were  printed  in  1801.  He  believed  that  by 
this  time  he  had  become  'a  grand  poet/  and  being  in  Edin- 
burgh to  sell  his  sheep,  and  having  to  wait  till  market-day, 
he  wrote  out  some  of  his  poems  from  memory, '  and  gave  them 
all  to  a  person  to  print/  at  his  own  expense.  They  sold,  but 
he  was  more  anxious,  just  then,  to  be  a  farmer  than  a  poet. 
In  this  he  failed,  but  having  been  discovered  by  Scott,  who 
came  out  to  his  mother's  cottage  to  take  down  the  old  ballads 
from  her  lips,  he  was  able  to  bring  out  his  '  Mountain  Bard/ 
in  which,  as  in  Scott's  'Minstrelsy  of  the  Scottish  Border/ 
there  were  old  ballads  and  imitations  of  old  ballads.  He  made 
money,  tried  farming  again,  and  lost  all  his  money.  After 
that,  'having  appeared  as  a  poet,  and  a  speculative  farmer 
besides/  no  one  would  even  take  him  as  a  shepherd,  and  he 
decided  to  give  himself  wholly  to  the  more  profitable  business 
of  writing.  He  went  to  Edinburgh,  started  and  wrote  a  news- 
paper called  '  The  Spy/  which  had  a  brief  existence ;  and,  in  the 
spring  of  1813,  brought  out  'The  Queen's  Wake/  which  con- 

(5)  The  Queen's  Wake,  1813.  (6)  The  Pilgrims  of  the  Sun,  1815. 
(7)  Mador  of  the  Moor,  1816.  (8)  The  Poetic  Mirror,  1816.  (9)  Queen 
Hynde,  1826.   (10)  Works,  2  vols.,  1865. 


JAMES  HOGG  99 

tains  the  best  work  he  was  ever  to  do,  and  which  immedi- 
ately gave  him  a  recognised  position  as  a  poet.  He  found  a 
friend  in  John  Wilson,  who  has  given  him  a  dubious  celebrity 
as  the  Ettrick  Shepherd  of  his  once  popular  '  Noctes  Ambro- 
sianae.'  From  first  to  last  he  took  himself  with  all  a  peasant's 
dogged  and  stolid  and  unshakable  vanity.  He  seems  to  have 
had  many  good  sober  qualities,  but  no  charm  to  make  up  for 
what  Wordsworth  considered  his  '  coarse  manners.'  His  face, 
as  one  sees  it  in  engravings,  is  full  of  hard  power,  but  without 
flexibility.  The  poetry  is  hidden  away,  no  doubt,  somewhere 
behind  that  high,  narrow  forehead;  but  the  mouth  is  un- 
attractively obstinate  and  the  eyes  are  cold. 

The  poetry  of  Hogg  is  wholly  destitute  of  passion ;  nothing 
human  moves  him,  except  the  unearthly  drollery  of  things. 
He  reverences  religion,  with  a  sober  conviction.;  preaches 
morality,  the  obvious  duties,  with  an  experienced  sense  of 
their  necessity  to  a  man  who  wishes  to  get  on  in  the  world. 
And  he  touches  frankly  on  love,  taking  it  from  various  points 
of  view,  as  a  quite  natural  instinct  and  as  a  feeling  capable  of 
elaborate  refinements.  But  neither  he  nor  any  of  the  persons 
of  his  songs  and  ballads  can  touch  one  with  a  single  personal 
thrill.  When,  in  his  fantastic  'Russiadde,'  Russell  is  lying  in 
the  arms  of  Venus,  in  the  depths  of  the  sea,  all  Hogg  can 
find  to  say  of  his  feelings  is :  — 

1  True  love  he  ne'er  before  had  felt, 
Love,  pure  as  purest  cryst'lization, 
The  sweetest,  fondest  admiration'; 

and  Russell  turns  away  from  Venus  to  watch  '  the  little  fishes 
wandering  by.'  Hogg  is  warmed  to  an  efficacious  enthusiasm 
only  by  something  inhuman.  He  can  write  ringingly  to  the 
sound  of  'battles  long  ago/  sometimes,  as  in  'Lock  the  door, 
Lariston/  in  almost  his  best  manner;  but  there  are  no  tears 
for  him  in  the  thought  that  some  '  sweet  war-man  is  dead.' 
Even  in  what  is  meant  to  move  you  by  its  horror,  as  in  '  The 
Lord  of  Balloch,'  nothing  human  returns  to  one,  only  the 


100    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

splendid  and  unearthly  image  of  the  eagle  sailing  on  a  cloud, 
and  screaming  from  the  height,  — 

'  For  he  saw  the  blood  below  his  feet, 
And  he  saw  it  red,  and  he  knew  it  sweet.' 

His  men  and  women  love,  hate,  suffer,  and  go  through  all  the 
acts  of  life,  like  strangers  who  copy  the  manners  of  those  they 
see  about  them,  but  without  ever  quite  understanding  the 
language  of  their  fellows.  It  is  as  if  his  heart  too  had  been  cap- 
tured and  turned  cold  by  the  fairies. 

In  his  feeling  for  nature  there  is  the  same  strangeness  of 
attitude.  Though,  as  he  says,  '  I  consider  myself  exquisite  at 
descriptions  of  nature,  and  mountain  scenery  in  particular,' 
and  though  he  valued  some  of  such  descriptions  in  '  Mador  of 
the  Moor  I  above  everything  else  that  he  had  written,  he  is 
rarely  able  to  do  much  with  nature,  taken  simply,  and  ob- 
served without  transposition.  Now  and  then  he  sets  down  a 
new,  fresh  detail,  just  as  he  has  seen  it ;  such  as :  — 

'  Or  dark  trout  spreads  his  waxing  O.' 

And  in  the  poem  called  'Storm  of  Thunder  among  Moun- 
tains' there  is  genuine  observation  of  natural  moods,  only 
put  into  what  he  thought  the  'grand  manner.'  But  he  is 
never  quite  himself  unless  he  is  looking  down  on  the  earth, 
from  a  witch's  broomstick,  as  in  'The  Witch  of  Fife,'  from  'far 
up  the  welkin,'  as  in  'The  Russiadde,'  from  higher  worlds,  as 
in  'The  Pilgrims  of  the  Sun.' 

'  Russ  never  saw  a  scene  so  fair 
As  Scotland  from  the  ambient  air,' 

we  are  told,  and  in  the  introduction  to  '  Mador '  the  poet  longs 
that '  some  spirit  at  the  midnight  noon '  would  bear  him  aloft 
into  middle  space,  so  that  he  might  see  all  Scotland  at  once. 
It  is  certain  that  his  descriptions  from  this  point  of  view  are 
much  better  than  those  done  on  a  mere  earthly  level.  One 
sees  that  inhuman  trait  coming  out  again,  in  his  relations  with 
nature,  just  as  in  his  relations  with  men  and  women. 


JAMES  HOGG  101 

And  I  do  not  think  it  is  fanciful  to  set  down  to  a' somewhat 
similar  reason  that  genius  for  parody  which  makes '  The  Poet's 
Mirror!  the  most  subtly  poetical  of  all  parodies  of  poetry. 
The  parody  of  Scott  ('Wat  o'  the  Cleuch')  is  like  a  more 
amusing,  a  more  abounding,  piece  of  Scott  himself,  into  which 
some  tricksy  imp  has  brought  a  little  companionable  mis- 
chief ;  the  parodies  of  Wordsworth  ('  James  Rigg,'  for  example) 
and  of  Coleridge  ('  Isabelle ' )  are  thought  out  from  inside  the 
skin  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  with  a  serene  and  devilish 
sympathy;  sympathy,  to  his  inhuman  nature,  being  an  un- 
canny thing,  and  evil-disposed.  In  his  original  writing  he  is 
often  out  of  key;  here,  never,  so  faultlessly  he  lets  himself  be 
guided,  like  the  medium  who  has  invoked  spirits.  The  imita- 
tive faculty,  once  set  in  motion,  acts  almost  unconsciously; 
it  is  the  failure  of  so  much  of  his  original  work  that  it  is  half 
imitative,  without  being  wholly  so. 

Hogg  is  nearest  humanity  when  he  abandons  himself  to  his 
humour ;  yet,  at  its  best,  his  humour  is  almost  more  unearthly 
than  his  more  obviously  romantic  qualities.  In  songs  like  that 
enchanting  one  whose  refrain  is :  — 

'O  love,  love,  love! 
Love  is  like  a  dizziness ! 
It  winna  let  a  puir  body 
Gang  about  his  business'; 

there  is  a  kind  of  quizzical  sly  Scotch  fooling  with  grave  things 
and  gay  things,  jumbled  together  by  a  shrewd  common  -sense. 
'The  Village  of  Balmaquhapple '  is  like  the  very  best  Irish 
work  in  that  kind,  more  headlong  in  its  gallop  than  most 
Scotch  songs.  And  there  are  others  of  his  songs  in  which  it 
is  the  undercurrent  of  humour  which  brings  into  them  what 
they  have  of  human  nature.  In  the  too  lengthy  ballad  called 
'The  Powris  of  Moseke  '  the  humour,  becoming  fantastic,  runs 
blindfold  into  imagination,  and  turns  its  somersaults  half  in 
and  half  out  of  a  fairies'  ring  on  the  grass.  '  The  Gude  Greye 
Katte/  which  was  meant  for  a  parody  on  himself,  and  'The 


102    HOMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Witch  or  Fife,'  which  it  parodies  (and,  as  he  fancied,  excels) 
are  danced  wholly  within  the  ring,  and  have  but  another,  and 
not  less  genuine,  nor  less  rare,  magic  of  their  own  than  '  Kil- 
meny/  in  which  for  once  he  has  achieved  pure  beauty. 

It  is  by  '  Kilmeny '  that  Hogg  first  became  famous,  and  it  is 
by  'Kilmeny'  that  his  fame  is  still  kept  alive,  among  those 
who  know  his  work  at  all.  It  is  the  story,  so  frequent  in  all 
Celtic  folk-lore,  and  believed  in  to-day  by  every  Irish  peasant, 
of  a  maiden  stolen  by  the  fairies,  and  brought  back  to  the 
earth  after  seven  years,  no  longer  human  with  desire.  'Be- 
sides the  old  tradition,'  says  Hogg,  'on  which  this  ballad  is 
founded,  there  are  some  modern  incidents  of  a  similar  nature, 
which  cannot  well  be  accounted  for,  yet  are  as  well  attested 
as  any  occurrence  that  has  taken  place  in  the  present  age.' 
There  had  been  witches  in  Hogg's  family,  notably  one  old 
woman,  a  contemporary  of  Michael  Scott,  known  as  Lucky 
Hogg.  And  never,  he  says,  'in  the  most  superstitious  ages, 
was  the  existence  of  witches,  or  the  influence  of  their  diabolical 
power,  more  firmly  believed  in,  than  by  the  inhabitants  of  the 
mountains  of  Ettrick  Forest  at  the  present  day.'  But,  he 
laments,  '  the  fairies  have  now  totally  disappeared ;  and  it  is  a 
pity  they  should ;  for  they  seem  to  have  been  the  most  delight- 
ful little  spirits  that  ever  haunted  the  Scottish  dells.'  Hogg 
brought  back  the  fairies  to  Scotland,  and  by  a  magic  of  which 
he  was  rather  the  slave  than  the  master.  He  tells  us  that  he 
'  quaked  by  night  and  mused  by  day '  on  the  Ettrick  hills :  — 

'  And  sore  I  feared  in  bush  or  brake  might  be 
Things  of  unearthly  make ' ; 

yet  he  was  only  too  ready  to  talk  of  'superstition,'  and  to 
reason  away  the  fears  that  were  rather  in  his  blood  than  in 
his  brain.  The  fairies  were  to  him  almost  as  merely  poetical 
material  as  they  might  have  been  to  Southey ;  but  they  were 
material  for  that  thin  flame  of  genius  which  was  in  him. 
'  Kilmeny '  is  an  inspiration,  and  it  escaped  from  him,  by  some 


JAMES  HOGG  103 

never-repeated  accident,  almost  flawless.  He  could  not  have 
told  you  how  that  poem  is  at  once  music  and  vision,  and  why 
the  best  words  came  for  once  almost  always  into  the  best 
places.  It  was  not  because  of  any  literal,  peasant  belief  in 
these  'superstitious'  things;  but,  as  certainly  as  with  Cole- 
ridge, from  a  poet's  'willing  suspension  of  belief.' 

Only,  the  magic  is  there;  unconsciously,  I  say,  because, 
with  all  his  trying,  he  could  never  repeat  it.  Perhaps  no  poet 
has  ever  evoked  fairyland  so  simply;  the  very  weaknesses  or 
trivialities,  here  and  there,  aiding  in  the  effect.  The  melody 
of  the  poem  is  the  most  lulling  melody  that  I  know  in  verse, 
full  of  a  sweet,  sleepy  monotony.  No  philosophy  is  wrapped  up 
in  the  flowers  and  beasts  of  it;  there  is  no  undercurrent  of 
meaning  to  be  teased  out  of  its  pictures.  There  is  only  what 
Hogg,  speaking  of  something  else,  calls  '  wild  unearthly  naked- 
ness.' 

Inspiration  came  to  Hogg  rarely ;  the  desire  to  write  verse 
almost  continually.  There  was  in  him  that  one  small,  bright 
flame  of  genius;  and  for  the  rest,  he  was  the  professional 
literary  man,  only  without  the  requisites  of  his  profession. 
He  tells  us  how,  having  finally,  in  1810,  failed  in  all  his  at- 
tempts at  farming,  '  I  took  my  plaid  about  my  shoulders,  and 
marched  away  to  Edinburgh,  determined,  since  no  better 
could  be,  to  push  my  fortune  as  a  literary  man.'  From  that 
time  till  his  death,  twenty-five  years  later,  he  lived  by  writing, 
making  the  most  he  could  of  the  fact  that  he  had  begun  by 
being  a  shepherd  in  the  mountains.  He  wrote  many  poems 
and  many  stories,  with  only  here  and  there  a  good  poem,  and, 
in  whole  long  cantos,  not  a  good  line ;  and  with  one  admirable 
story,  'The  Private  Memoirs  and  Confessions  of  a  Justified 
Sinner.'  'It  being  a  story  replete  with  horrors,  after  I  had 
written  it,'  says  Hogg,  'I  durst  not  venture  to  put  my  name 
to  it ' ;  and  it  has  often  been  asserted  that  part  of  the  writing 
was  Lockhart's.  It  is  very  nearly  a  masterpiece  of  its  kind,  a 
kind  somewhere  between  Bunyan  and  a  spiritual  Defoe.    It 


104    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

might  have  suggested  Poe's  'William  Wilson,'  and  it  has  a 
horror  which  even  Poe  has  hardly  exceeded.  But  it  is  as  a 
piece  of  psychology  that  it  is  most  remarkable :  the  lean,  dry 
record  of  a  wrinkled  soul,  which  projects  its  own  devil  upon 
the  outer  air,  and  dies  the  suicide  of  its  enemy,  itself. 

Here,  for  once  (was  this  really  some  helping  influence  of 
Lockhart?),  Hogg  is  grimly  self-possessed,  master  of  his 
material.  He  tells  us  proudly  that  he  never  re-wrote.  Not  to 
revise  means,  to  him, '  to  hold  fast  my  integrity ' ;  he  will  try 
to  write  better  next  time,  but  what  he  has  written  he  has 
written.  The  consequence  of  this  proud  incapacity  is  that  all 
but  his  very  best  work  is  both  spun  out  to  weakness  and 
marred  by  absurdities  of  language.  The  Scotch  dialect  was  at 
once  a  help  and  a  disguise  to  him.  Sometimes  the  difference  is 
only  apparent,  but  for  the  most  part  he  is  better  able  to  mould 
words  to  his  thought  out  of  the  homely  dialect  whose  shades 
of  meaning  were  so  much  clearer  to  him  than  those  of  English. 
In  English  he  uses  words  that  express  his  meaning,  but  whose 
poverty  or  formality  as  words  he  does  not  realise.  He  does 
not  hear  the  absurdity  of  writing,  — 

'  No  torrent,  no  rock,  her  velocity  staid,' 

or,  — 

'  And  hauberk,  armlet,  cuirass,  rung 
Promiscuous  on  the  green.' 

In  Scotch  his  ear  tells  him  when  a  word  rings  true,  and  he 

can  write  stanza  after  stanza  with  this  fine  and  masterly 

swing :  — 

'  And  the  bauld  windis  blew,  and  the  fire  flauchtis  flew 
And  the  sea  ran  to  the  skie ; 

And  the  thunder  it  growlit,  and  the  sea-dogs  howlit, 
As  we  gaed  scouryng  bye.' 

Hogg  knew  that  a  song,  at  least  a  Scotch  song,  was  '  made  for 
singing,  an'  no  for  reading/  as  his  mother  told  Scott,  when 
Scott  had  spoilt  the  old  ballads  by  printing  them;  his  first 
poems,  made  before  he  could  write  them  down,  were  'songs 


JAMES  HOGG  105 

and  ballads  made  up  for  the  lasses  to  sing  in  chorus.'  When 
he  was  fourteen  he  had  saved  five  shillings  of  his  wages,  and 
bought  an  old  fiddle.  You  hear  the  fiddle  jigging  away  through 
his  verse  for  singing,  with  its  recaptured  refrains :  — 

'  There  wals  ane  auld  caryl  wonit  in  you  howe, 
Lemedon  !  lemedon  !  ayden  lillelu  ! 
His  face  was  the  geire,  and  his  hay  re  was  the  woo, 
Sing  Ho !  Ro !  Gillan  of  Allanhu  ! ' 

But  it  was  his  mistake,  the  mistake  partly  of  ignorance,  partly 
of  that '  inherent  vanity '  to  which  he  confesses  with  so  evident 
a  satisfaction,  to  have  the  'fixed  opinion,  that  if  a  person 
could  succeed  in  the  genuine  ballad  style,  his  muse  was  ade- 
quate for  any  other/ 

When  Hogg  was  not  at  his  best,  and  he  was  rarely  at  his 
best,  considering  the  amount  of  work  which  he  produced,  he 
was  almost  totally  worthless.  Much  of  'The  Queen's  Wake,' 
nearly  all  of  'Mador  of  the  Moor,'  'The  Pilgrims  of  the  Sun,' 
and  'Queen  Hynde,'  is  not  even  interestingly  bad,  but  con- 
sistently feeble.  He  imitated  not  only  Scott  and  Byron,  but 
Professor  Wilson,  whose '  fanciful  and  visionary  scenes '  he  was 
'so  greatly  taken  with' ;  and  to  imitate  Wilson  was  to  dilute 
an  already  thrice-diluted  source.  The  main  part  of  this  work, 
on  the  weakest  portions  of  which  he  was  ready  to  '  stake  his 
credit,'  is  not  even  readable,  and  it  has  no  personal  quality, 
nothing  to  make  up  for  its  imitative  feebleness.  He  thought 
he  had  produced  'the  best  epic  poem  that  had  been  produced 
in  Scotland,'  and  reformed  the  Spenserian  stanza '  to  its  proper 
harmony.'  When  he  said  to  Robert  Montgomery,  who  had 
asked  his  opinion  on  his  poems,  'I  daresay,  Robert,  they're 
gey  gude,  but  I  never  a'  my  life  could  thole  college  poetry  — 
it's  sae  desperate  stupid,'  he  did  not  realise  that  he  himself 
had  only  been  making  '  college  poetry '  whenever  he  stepped 
outside  that  tiny  local  ring  in  which  the  fairies  danced  in 
homespun,  or  when  he  spoke  in  a  language  that  he  had  not 
used  to  his  cows,  'when  the  kye  comes  hame.' 


106    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


GEORGE  CANNING   (1770-1827) l 

Among  the  political  satires  of  the  age,  crude,  townish,  and 
temporary,  we  need  not  linger  over  'The  Criticisms  of  the 
Rolliad,'  which  appeared  in  1784-85,  and  were  followed  by 
'  Probationary  Odes  for  the  Laureateship ' ;  they  were  the  work 
of  many  contributors,  now  mostly  forgotten,  and  they  are  now 
amusing  only  to  those  who  are  acquainted  with  Mason  and 
Warton,  and  Lord  Monboddo,  who  invented  the  human  ourang- 
outang  before  Peacock,  and  cantankerous  scholars  like  Sir 
John  Hawkins,  and  Mrs.  George  Anne  Bellamy,  the  impecuni- 
ous actress.  The  prose  parodies  are  the  best,  and  anticipate 
the  prose  of  the  'Anti-Jacobin,'  while  the  verse  of  the  pro- 
bationary odes  must  have  suggested  part  of  the  plan  of 
the  'Rejected  Addresses.'  But  it  is  in  the  'Anti-Jacobin' 
(1799-1800)  that  we  have  the  finest  satire.  It  was  written 
mainly  by  Canning,  Frere,  and  George  Ellis,  and  Canning  was 
the  finest  wit  among  them. 

The  satire  was  directed  against  the  stultification  of  ideas, 
the  absurdities  of  literature  and  politics,  and,  unlike  most 
satires,  it  has  survived  its  occasion.  The  '  Poetry  of  the  Anti- 
Jacobin  '  has  been  imitated  ever  since,  by  political  and  social 
and  literary  satirists,  but  it  has  never  been  excelled  in  its 
own  way ;  and  the  salt  in  it  has  not  yet  lost  its  savour.  It  set 
a  fashion,  and  one  can  trace  Barham  and  Calverley  in  it,  and 
later  men.  The  needy  knife-grinder's  answer  to  the  friend  of 
humanity  is  one  of  the  remembered  lines  of  English  poetry, 
and  the  inscription  on  Mrs.  Brownrigg  is  one  of  the  classics  of 
parody.  And,  throughout,  there  are  lyric  high-spirits,  and 
the  dancers  brandish  real  swords. 

1  Poems,  1823. 


HENRY  BOYD  107 


HENRY  BOYD  (1770-1832) l 

Henry  Boyd  (probably  born  about  1770;  he  died  in  1832)  is 
generally  said  to  be  the  first  translator  of  Dante  into  English 
verse.  His  'Inferno'  was  published  in  1785,  and  Hayley,  in 
the  voluminous  notes  to  his '  Essay  on  Epic  Poetry,!  had  already, 
in  1782,  published  a  translation  in  terza  rima  of  the  first  three 
cantos.  'I  believe/  he  says,  'no  entire  Canto  of  Dante  has 
hitherto  appeared  in  our  language.  .  .  .  He  has  endeavoured 
to  give  the  English  reader  an  idea  of  Dante's  peculiar  manner, 
by  adopting  his  triple  rhyme ;  and  he  does  not  recollect  that  this 
mode  of  versification  has  ever  appeared  before  in  our  language.' 
He  adds,  with  his  usual  imperturbable  impertinence,  that  he 
had  been  solicited  to  execute  an  entire  translation  of  Dante : 
'  but  the  extreme  inequality  of  this  Poet  would  render  such  a 
work  a  very  laborious  undertaking.'  From  the  specimens,  we 
may  be  grateful  that  Hayley  carried  his  translation  no  further. 
It  is  just  possible,  however,  that  Blake  may  have  got  his  first 
lessons  in  Dante  and  Italian  from  these  parallel  columns  in 
the  two  languages,  at  the  later  period  when  Hayley  notes  in 
one  of  his  letters:  'Read  Klopstock  aloud  to  Blake.'  For 
Hayley's  version  though  not  a  poet's  of  a  poet,  is  almost 
word  for  word  (so  that  fastidiosi  verme  figures  as  '  fastidious 
worms'),  and  would  have  been  useful  as  a  lesson. 

It  was  not  only  in  his  translation  of  Dante  that  Hayley 
anticipated  Boyd,  but  in  an  analysis  and  partial  rendering  of 
the  '  Araucana '  of  the  Spanish  poet  Ercilla.  Boyd's  transla- 
tion was  finished,  though  apparently  not  printed,  in  1805. 
Hayley,  in  the  notes  to  this  third  epistle,  gives  a  hundred  pages 
to  Ercilla,  whom  he  finds  more  palatable  than  Dante.  Like 
Dante,  he  finds  him  '  unequal,  but,  with  all  his  defects,  one  of  the 

1  (1)  Dante's  'Inferno,'  1785.  (2)  Poems,  Chiefly  Dramatic  and  Lyric, 
1793.  (3)  Dante's  ' Divina  Commedia,'  3  vols.,  1802.  (4)  Monti's  'Pen- 
ance of  Hugo,  a  Vision,'  1805.  (5)  The  Woodman's  Tale,  1805.  (6)  The 
Triumphs  of  Petrarch,  1807. 


108    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

most  extraordinary  and  engaging  characters  in  the  poetical 
world.'  'This  exalted  character/  he  says,  'is  almost  unknown 
in  our  country ' ;  although  his  style,  '  notwithstanding  the 
restraint  of  rhyme,  has  frequently  all  the  ease,  the  spirit,  and 
the  volubility  of  Homer.' 

The  metre  used  by  Boyd  in  his  Dante  and  Monti  is  a  six- 
line  stanza,  formed  of  two  couplets  divided  by  two  single  lines ; 
for  Ariosto  he  used  the  Spenserian  stanza,  and  for  Petrarch, 
to  his  disadvantage,  the  heroic  couplet.  The  Dante  is  not 
without  merit;  Boyd  is  always  aware  that  he  is  translating 
a  poet.  Left  alone,  he  wrote  but  mediocre  verse,  a  temperance 
allegory  called  'The  Woodman's  Tale,'  a  drama  on  David 
and  Bathsheba,  and  some  odes  and  epitaphs. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT   (1771-1832)  » 

Scott  was  twenty-six,  the  age  of  Keats  at  his  death,  before 
he  wrote  any  original  verse.  He  then  wrote  two  poems  to  two 
ladies :  one  out  of  a  bitter  personal  feeling,  the  other  as  a  pass- 
ing courtesy;  neither  out  of  any  instinct  for  poetry.  At 
twenty-four  he  had  translated  the  fashionable  'Lenore'  of 
Burger;  afterwards  he  translated  Goethe's  youthful  play, 
'  Goetz  von  Berlichingen.'  In  1802  he  brought  out  the  first  two 
volumes  of  the '  Minstrelsy  of  the  Scottish  Border,'  in  which  the 
resurrection  of  the  old  ballad  literature,  begun  in  1765  by 
Percy's  '  Reliques,'  was  carried  on,  and  brought  nearer  to  the 
interest  of  ordinary  readers,  who,  in  Scott's  admirable  intro- 
ductions and  notes,  could  find  almost  a  suggestion  of  what 

1  (1)  The  Eve  of  St.  John,  1800.  (2)  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,  1805. 
(3)  Ballads  and  Lyrical  Pieces,  1806.  (4)  Marmion,  1808.  (5)  The 
Lady  of  the  Lake,  1810.  (6)  The  Vision  of  Don  Roderick,  1811.  (7) 
Glenfinlas  and  other  Ballads,  1812.  (8)  Rokeby,  1813.  (9)  The  Bridal  of 
Triermain,  1813.  (10)  The  Lord  of  the  Isles,  1815.  (11)  The  Field  of 
Waterloo,  1815.  (12)  Harold  the  Dauntless,  1817.  (13)  Miscellaneous 
Poems,  1820.    (14)  Halidon  Hall,  1822. 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  109 

was  to  come  in  the  Waverley  Novels.  The  'Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel '  was  begun  in  1802,  and  published,  when  Scott 
was  thirty-four,  in  1805.  It  was  begun  at  the  suggestion  of  the 
Duchess  of  Buccleugh,  and  continued  to  please  her.  Lockhart 
tells  us :  '  Sir  John  Stoddart's  casual  recitation  of  Coleridge's 
unfinished  "  Christabel "  had  fixed  the  music  of  that  noble  frag- 
ment in  his  memory ;  and  it  occurred  to  him  that,  by  throwing 
the  story  of  Gilpin  Horner  into  somewhat  similar  cadence,  he 
might  produce  such  an  echo  of  the  later  metrical  romances 
as  would  seem  to  connect  his  conclusion  of  the  primitive  "  Sir 
Tristram"  with  the  imitation  of  the  popular  ballad  in  the  "  Grey 
Brother  "  and  the  "  Eve  of  St.  John."  •  Its  success  was  immedi- 
ate, and  for  seven  years  Scott  was  the  most  popular  poet  in  Eng- 
land. When  the  first  two  cantos  of  '  Childe  Harold's  Pilgrim- 
age '  appeared  in  1812,  there  was  a  more  popular  poet  in  Eng- 
land, and  Scott  gave  up  writing  verse,  and,  in  the  summer  of 
1814,  took  up  and  finished  a  story  which  he  had  begun  in 
1805,  simultaneously  with  the  publication  of  the  'Lay  of  the 
Last  Minstrel,'  —  the  story  of  'Waverley.'  The  novelist 
died  eleven  years  later,  in  1825 ;  but  the  poet  committed  sui- 
cide, with  '  Harold  the  Dauntless,'  in  1817. 

Until  he  was  thirty-one  Scott  was  unconscious  that  he  had 
any  vocation  except  to  be  a  'half-lawyer,  half-sportsman.' 
At  forty-three  he  discovered,  sooner  than  all  the  world,  that  he 
had  mistaken  his  vocation ;  and  with  that  discovery  came  the 
other  one,  that  he  had  a  vocation,  which  he  promptly  accepted, 
and  in  which,  with  his  genius  for  success,  he  succeeded,  as  in- 
stantaneously, and  more  permanently.  He  was  always  able  to 
carry  the  world  with  him,  as  he  carried  with  him  his  little 
world  of  friends,  servants,  dogs,  and  horses.  And  how  deeply 
rooted  in  the  work  itself  was  this  persuasive  and  overcoming 
power  is  proved  by  the  fact  that  'Waverley'  was  published 
anonymously,  and  that  the  other  novels  were  only  known,  for 
many  years,  as  by  the  author  of  '  Waverley.'  None  of  the  pres- 
tige of  the  poet  was  handed  over  to  the  novelist.    Scott  at- 


110    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

tacked  the  public  twice  over,  quite  independently,  and  con- 
quered it  both  times  easily. 

Success  with  the  public  of  one's  own  day  is,  of  course,  no 
fixed  test  of  a  man's  work ;  and,  while  it  is  indeed  surprising 
that  the  same  man  could  be,  first  the  most  popular  poet  and 
then  the  most  popular  novelist  of  his  generation,  almost  of  his 
century,  there  is  no  cause  for  surprise  that  the  public  should 
have  judged,  in  the  one  case,  justly,  and  in  the  other  unjustly. 
The  voice  of  the  people,  the  voice  of  the  gods  of  the  gallery, 
howls  for  or  against  qualities  which  are  never  qualities  of  liter- 
ature ;  and  the  admirers  of  Scott  have  invariably  spoken  of  his 
verse  in  praise  that  would  be  justified  if  the  qualities  for  which 
they  praise  it  were  qualities  supplementary  to  the  essentially 
poetic  qualities :  they  form  no  substitute.  First  Scott,  and  then 
Byron,  partly  in  imitation  of  Scott,  appealed  to  the  public  of 
their  day  with  poems  which  sold  as  only  novels  have  sold  be- 
fore or  since,  and  partly  because  they  were  so  like  novels.  They 
were,  what  every  publisher  still  wants,  'stories  with  plenty 
of  action ' ;  and  the  public  either  forgave  their  being  in  verse, 
or  for  some  reason  was  readier  than  usual,  just  then,  to  wel- 
come verse.  It  was  Scott  himself  who  was  to  give  the  novel  a 
popularity  which  it  had  never  had,  even  with  Fielding  and 
Richardson;  and  thus  the  novel  had  not  yet  flooded  all  other 
forms  of  literature  for  the  average  reader.  Young  ladies  still 
cultivated  ideals  between  their  embroidery  frames  and  their 
gilt  harps.  An  intellectual  democracy  had  not  yet  set  up  its 
own  standards,  and  affected  to  submit  art  to  its  own  tastes. 
This  poetry,  so  like  the  most  interesting,  the  most  exciting 
prose,  came  at  once  on  the  wave  of  a  fashion :  the  fashion  of 
German  ballads  and  '  tales  of  wonder '  and  of  the  more  genuine 
early  ballads  of  England  and  Scotland ;  and  also  with  a  new, 
spontaneous  energy  all  its  own.  And  it  was  largely  Scott  him- 
self who  had  helped  to  make  the  fashion  by  which  he  profited. 

The  metrical  romance,  as  it  was  written  by  Scott,  was  avow- 
edly derived  from  the  metrical  romances  of  the  Middle  Ages, 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  111 

one  of  which  Scott  had  edited  and  even  concluded  in  the  origi- 
nal metre :  the  '  Sir  Tristrem '  which  he  attributed  to  Thomas 
of  Ercildoune.  This  '  Sir  Tristrem '  is  but  one  among  many 
fragmentary  versions  of  a  lost  original,  giving  the  greatest  of 
all  legends  of  chivalry,  the  legend  of  Tristan  and  Iseult.  The 
most  complete  and  the  finest  version  which  we  have  is  the 
poem  in  octosyllabic  couplets  written  in  German  by  Gottfried 
of  Strassburg  at  the  beginning  of  1200.  In  this  poem  we  see 
what  a  metrical  romance  can  be,  and  it  is  no  injustice  to  Scott 
if  we  put  it  for  a  moment  beside  his  attempts  to  continue  that 
heroic  lineage. 

A  friend  of  mine,  an  Irish  poet,  was  telling  me  the  other  day 
that  he  had  found  himself,  not  long  ago,  in  a  small  town  in 
the  West  of  Ireland,  Athenry,  a  little  lonely  place,  with  its 
ruined  castle ;  and  having  to  wait  there,  because  he  had  taken 
the  wrong  train,  he  took  out  of  his  pocket  a  prose  version  of 
Gottfried's  poem,  and  sat  reading  it  for  some  hours.  And  sud- 
denly a  pang  went  through  him,  with  an  acute  sense  of  per- 
sonal loss,  as  he  said  to  himself :  '  I  shall  never  know  the  man 
who  wrote  that ;  I  have  never  known  any  man  who  was  such 
a  gentleman.'  ^The  poem,  with  all  its  lengthy  adventures,  its 
lengthy  comments,  is  full  of  the  passion  of  beauty ;  the  love  of 
Tristan  and  Iseult  is  a  grave  thing,  coming  to  them  in  one  cup 
wTith  death.  '  Love,'  says  the  poet, '  she  who  turneth  the  honey 
to  gall,  sweet  to  sour,  and  dew  to  flame,  had  laid  her  burden  on 
Tristan  and  Iseult,  and  as  they  looked  on  each  other  their  colour 
changed  from  white  to  red  and  from  red  to  white,  even  as  it 
pleased  Love  to  paint  them.  Each  knew  the  mind  of  the 
other,  yet  was  their  speech  of  other  things.'  And,  at  their  last 
parting,  Iseult  can  say:  'We  two  have  loved  and  sorrowed 
in  such  true-fellowship  unto  this  time,  we  should  not  find  it 
over-hard  to  keep  the  same  faith  even  to  death.  .  .  .  What- 
ever land  thou  seekest,  have  a  care  for  thyself  —  my  life;  for 
if  I  be  robbed  of  that,  then  am  I,  thy  life,  undone.  And  myself, 
thy  life,  will  I  for  thy  sake,  not  for  mine,  guard  with  all  care. 


112    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

For  thy  body  and  thy  life,  that  know  I  well,  they  rest  on  me. 
Now  bethink  thee  well  of  me,  thy  body,  Iseult^/This,  remem- 
ber, is  in  a  metrical  romance,  written  in  the  metre  of  the 
'  Lady  of  the  Lake.'  Now  turn  to  that  poem,  and  read  there :  — 

'  Nor  while  on  Ellen's  faltering  tongue 
Her  filial  welcomes  crowded  hung, 
Marked  she,  that  fear  (affection's  proof) 
Still  held  a  graceful  youth  aloof; 
No !  not  till  Douglas  named  his  name, 
Although  that  youth  was  Malcolm  Graeme.' 

Much  has  been  claimed  for  Scott's  poetry  because  of  its  ap- 
peal to  unpoetical  persons,  who,  in  the  nature  of  things,  would 
be  likely  to  take  an  interest  in  its  subject-matter;  and  it  has 
been  thought  remarkable  that  poetry  composed,  like  much 
of  'Marmion/  in  the  saddle,  by  one  'through  whose  head  a 
regiment  of  horse  has  been  exercising  since  he  was  five  years 
old/  should  have  seemed  genuine  to  sportsmen  and  to  soldiers. 
A  striking  anecdote  told  by  Lockhart  allows  us  to  consider  the 
matter  very  clearly.  '  In  the  course  of  the  day,  when  the  "  Lady 
of  the  Lake  "  first  reached  Sir  Adam  Ferguson,  he  was  posted 
with  his  company  on  a  point  of  ground  exposed  to  the  enemy's 
artillery,  somewhere  no  doubt  on  the  lines  of  Torres  Vedras. 
The  men  were  ordered  to  lie  prostrate  on  the  ground;  while 
they  kept  that  attitude,  the  captain,  kneeling  at  the  head, 
read  aloud  the  description  of  the  battle  in  Canto  VI,  and  the 
listening  soldiers  only  interrupted  him  by  a  joyous  huzza  when 
the  French  shot  struck  the  bank  close  above  them.'  '  It  is  not 
often/  says  Mr.  Hutton  in  his  'Life  of  Scott/  'that  martial 
poetry  has  been  put  to  such  a  test.'  A  test  of  what?  Certainly 
not  a  test  of  poetry.  An  audience  less  likely  to  be  critical, 
a  situation  less  likely  to  induce  criticism,  can  hardly  be  im- 
agined. The  soldiers  would  look  for  martial  sentiments  ex- 
pressed with  clear  and  matter-of-fact  fervour.  They  would 
want  no  more  and  they  would  find  no  more ;  certainly  no  such 
intrusion  of  poetry  as  would  have  rendered  the  speech  of 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  113 

Henry  V  before  the  battle  of  Agincourt  but  partially  intelligi- 
ble to  them,  though  there  Shakespeare  is  writing  for  once  almost 
down  to  his  audience.  Scott's  appeal  is  the  appeal  of  prose, 
the  thing  and  the  feeling  each  for  its  own  sake,  with  only  that 
'pleasurable  excitement/  which  Coleridge  saw  in  the  mere  fact 
of  metre,  to  give  the  illusion  that  one  is  listening  to  poetry. 

Let  me  give  an  instance  from  another  art.  If,  on  his  return 
to  England,  you  had  taken  one  of  Sir  Adam  Ferguson's  sol- 
diers into  a  picture  gallery,  and  there  had  been  a  Botticelli  in 
one  corner,  and  a  Titian  in  another,  and  between  two  Bellini 
altar-pieces  there  had  been  a  modern  daub  representing  a 
battle,  in  which  fire  and  smoke  were  clearly  discernible,  and 
charging  horses  rolled  over  on  their  riders,  and  sabres  were 
being  flourished  in  a  way  very  like  the  trooper's  way,  is  there 
much  doubt  which  picture  would  go  straight  home  to  the  sol- 
dier? There,  it  might  be  said,  is  a  battle-piece,  and  the  soldier 
goes  up  to  it,  examines  it,  admires  it,  swears  that  nothing  more 
natural  was  ever  painted.  Is  that  a  'test'  of  the  picture?  Are 
we  to  say :  this  picture  has  been  proved  to  be  sincere,  natural, 
appro vable  by  one  who  has  been  through  the  incident  which  it 
records,  and  therefore  (in  spite  of  its  total  lack  of  every  fine 
quality  in  painting)  a  good  picture?  No  one,  I  think,  would 
take  the  soldier's  word  for  that :  why  should  we  take  his  word 
on  a  battle-piece  which  is  not  painted,  but  written? 

A  great  many  of  the  merits  which  people  have  accustomed 
themselves  to  see  in  Scott  come  from  this  kind  of  miscalcula- 
tion. Thus,  for  instance,  we  may  admit,  with  Mr.  Palgrave, 
that  Scott  'attained  eminent  success'  in  'sustained  vigour, 
clearness,  and  interest  in  narration.'  'If  we  reckon  up  the 
poets  of  the  world,'  continues  Mr.  Palgrave,  'we  may  be  sur- 
prised to  find  how  very  few  (dramatists  not  included)  have 
accomplished  this,  and  may  be  hence  led  to  estimate  Scott's 
rank  in  his  art  more  justly.'  But  is  not  this  rather  a  begging 
of  the  question?  Scott  wrote  in  metre,  of  which  Hogg  said 
acutely,  that  it  had  'spirit  and  animation,  and  a  sort  of  battle 


rHE 
wrnciTY 


114     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

rapidity  quite  peculiar,  but  seldom  any  true  melody/  and  in 
some  of  his  metrical  narratives  he  attained  '  sustained  vigour, 
clearness,  and  interest  in  narration.'  But  is  there  anything 
except  the  metre  to  distinguish  these  stories  in  verse  from 
what,  as  Scott  himself  afterwards  showed,  might  have  been 
much  better  if  they  had  been  told  in  prose?  Until  this  has  been 
granted,  no  merit  in  narration  will  mean  anything  at  all,  in  a 
consideration  of  poetry  as  poetry ;  any  more  than  the  noughts 
which  you  may  add  to  the  left  of  your  figure  1,  in  the  belief 
that  you  are  adding  million  to  million. 

The  fact  is,  that  skill  in  story-telling  never  made  any  man 
a  poet,  any  more  than  skill  in  constructing  a  drama.  Shake- 
speare is  not,  in  the  primary  sense,  a  poet  because  he  is  a  great 
dramatist ;  he  is  a  poet  as  much  in  the  sonnets  as  in  the  plays, 
but  he  is  a  poet  who  chose  to  be  also  a  playwright,  and  in  mea- 
suring his  greatness  we  measure  all  that  he  did  as  a  playwright 
along  with  all  that  he  did  as  a  poet ;  his  especial  greatness  being 
seen  by  his  complete  fusion  of  the  two  in  one.  And  it  is  the 
same  thing  in  regard  to  story-telling.  Look  for  a  moment  at 
our  greatest  narrative  poet,  Chaucer.  Chaucer  tells  his  stories 
much  better,  much  more  pointedly,  concisely,  with  much 
more  of  the  qualities  of  the  best  prose  narrative,  than  Scott, 
who  seems  to  tell  his  stories  rather  for  boys  than  for  men,  with 
what  he  very  justly  called  '  a  hurried  frankness  of  composition, 
which  pleases  soldiers,  sailors,  and  young  people  of  bold  and 
active  dispositions.'  Chaucer  is  one  of  the  most  masculine  of 
story-tellers,  and  if  you  read,  not  even  one  of  the  '  Canterbury 
Tales,'  but  a  book  of  'Troilus  and  Cressida,'  you  will  find  in  it 
something  of  the  quality  which  we  applaud  in  Balzac:  an 
enormous  interest  in  life,  and  an  absorption  in  all  its  details, 
because  those  details  go  to  make  up  the  most  absorbing  thing 
in  the  world.  But  in  Chaucer  all  this  is  so  much  prose  quality 
added  to  a  consummate  gift  for  poetry.  Chaucer  is  first  of  all  a 
poet;  it  is  almost  an  accident,  the  accident  of  his  period,  that 
he  wrote  tales  in  verse.  In  the  Elizabethan  age  he  would  have 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  115 

been  a  great  dramatist,  and  he  has  all  the  qualities  that  go  to 
the  making  of  a  great  lyrical  poet.  His  whole  vision  of  life  is 
the  vision  of  the  poet ;  his  language  and  versification  have  the 
magic  of  poetry;  he  has  wisdom,  tenderness,  a  high  gravity, 
tinged  with  illuminating  humour ;  no  one  in  our  language  has 
said  more  touching  and  beautiful  things,  straight  out  of  his 
heart,  about  birds  and  flowers  and  grass ;  he  has  ecstasy.  In 
addition  to  all  this  he  can  tell  stories :  that  was  the  new  life 
that  he  brought  into  the  poetry  of  his  time,  rescuing  us  from 
'  the  moral  Gower  '  and  much  tediousness. 

Now  look  at  Scott:  I  do  not  say,  ask  Scott  to  be  another 
Chaucer;  but  consider  for  a  moment  how  much  his  admirers 
have  to  add  to  that  all-important  merit  of  '  sustained  vigour, 
clearness,  and  interest  in  narration.'  Well,  it  has  been  claimed, 
first  and  most  emphatically,  I  think,  by  Sir  Francis  Doyle, 
that  his  poetry  is  '  Homeric.'  Sir  Francis  Doyle  says,  in  one 
of  his  lectures  on  Scott,  given  when  Professor  of  Poetry  at 
Oxford:  'Now,  after  the  immortal  ballads  of  Homer,  there 
are  no  ballad  poems  so  full  of  the  spirit  of  Homer  as  those 
of  Scott.'  Homer,  indeed,  wrote  of  war  and  warriors,  and  so 
did  Scott;  Homer  gives  you  vivid  action,  in  swiftly  moving 
verse,  and  so  does  Scott.  But  I  can  see  little  further  resem- 
blance, and  I  can  see  an  infinite  number  of  differences.  No 
one,  I  suppose,  would  compare  the  pit-a-pat  of  Scott's  oc- 
tosyllabics with  'the  deep-mouthed  music'  of  the  Homeric 
hexameter.  But  Sir  Francis  Doyle  sees  in  the  opening  of  the 
'Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel,'  and  not  in  this  alone,  'the  simple 
and  energetic  style  of  Homer.'  Let  me,  then,  take  one  single 
sentence  from  that  battle  in  Canto  VI  of  the  'Lady  of  the 
Lake,'  and  set  against  it  a  single  sentence  from  one  of  the 
battle-pieces  in  the  Iliad,  in  the  prose  translation  of  Mr.  Lang. 
Here  is  Scott's  verse :  — 

'Forth  from  the  pass,  in  tumult  driven, 
Like  chaff  before  the  wind  of  heaven, 
The  archery  appear; 


116    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

For  life !  for  life !  their  flight  they  ply, 
And  shriek,  and  shout,  and  battle-cry, 
And  plaids  and  bonnets  waving  high, 
And  broadswords  flashing  to  the  sky, 
Are  maddening  in  the  rear.' 

And  here  is  Homer  in  English  prose :  '  And  as  the  gusts  speed 
on,  when  shrill  winds  blow,  on  a  day  when  dust  lies  thickest 
on  the  roads,  even  so  their  battle  clashed  together,  and  all 
were  fain  of  heart  to  slay  each  other  in  the  press  with  the 
keen  bronze.'  Need  I  say  more  than  these  extracts  say  for 
themselves?  What  commonness  and  what  distinction,  what 
puerility  of  effort  and  what  repose  in  energy ! 

Then  there  is  Scott's  feeling  for  nature.  The  feeling  was 
deep  and  genuine,  and  in  a  conversation  with  Washington 
Irving  Scott  expressed  it  more  poignantly  than  he  has  ever 
done  in  his  verse.  'When,'  he  said,  'I  have  been  for  some 
time  in  the  rich  scenery  about  Edinburgh,  which  is  like  or- 
namented garden  land,  I  begin  to  wish  myself  back  again 
among  my  own  honest  grey  hills ;  and  if  I  did  not  see  the 
heather  at  least  once  a  year,  I  think  I  should  die!'  There  is  a 
great  deal  of  landscape  painting  in  Scott's  verse,  and  it  has 
many  good  prose  qualities :  it  is  very  definite,  it  is  written 
'with  the  eye  on  the  object,'  it  is  always  sincere,  in  a  certain 
sense ;  it  is  always  felt  sincerely.  But  it  is  not  felt  deeply,  and 
it  becomes  either  trite  or  generalised  in  its  rendering  into 
words.  Take  the  description  of  Loch  Katrine  in  the  third  canto 
of  the  'Lady  of  the  Lake,'  the  final  passage  which  Ruskin 
quotes  for  special  praise  in  that  chapter  of  '  Modern  Painters ' 
which  is  devoted  to  a  eulogy  of  Scott  as  the  master  of  'the 
modern  landscape !  in  verse.  It  gives  a  pretty  and,  no  doubt, 
accurate  picture,  but  with  what  vagueness,  triteness,  or  con- 
ventionality of  epithet!  We  get  one  line  in  which  there  is  no 
more  than  a  statement,  which  may  have  its  place  in  poetry :  — 

'The  grey  mist  left  the  mountain  side.' 

In  the  next  line  we  get  a  purely  conventional  rendering  of 


SIR  WALTER  SCOTT  117 

what  has  evidently  been  both  seen  clearly  and  felt  sympa- 
thetically :  — 

1  The  torrent  showed  its  glistening  pride.' 

How  false  and  insincere  that  becomes  in  the  mere  putting  into 
words !  And  what  a  cliche  is  the  simile  for  the  first  faint  shad- 
ows on  the  lake  at  dawn :  — 

'  In  bright  uncertainty  they  lie, 
Like  future  joys  to  Fancy's  eye.' 

Even  in  better  landscape  work,  like  the  opening  of  the  first 
introduction  to  '  Marmion,'  how  entirely  without  magic  is  the 
observation,  how  superficial  a  notation  of  just  what  every  one 
would  notice  in  the  scenery  before  him !  To  Ruskin,  I  know, 
all  this  is  a  part  of  what  he  calls  Scott's  unselfishness  and 
humility,  'in  consequence  of  which  Scott's  enjoyment  of  Na- 
ture is  incomparably  greater  than  that  of  any  other  poet  I 
know.'  Enjoyment,  perhaps ;  but  we  are  concerned,  in  poetry, 
with  what  a  poet  has  made  out  of  his  enjoyment.  Scott  puts 
down  in  words  exactly  what  the  average  person  feels.  Now  it 
is  the  poet's  business  to  interpret,  illuminate,  or  at  the  least  to 
evoke  in  a  more  exquisite  form,  all  that  the  ordinary  person 
is  capable  of  feeling  vaguely,  by  way  of  enjoyment.  Until  the 
poet  has  transformed  enjoyment  into  ecstasy  there  can  be  no 
poetry.  Scott's  genuine  love  of  nature,  so  profound  in  feeling, 
as  his  words  to  Washington  Irving  testify,  was  never  able  to 
translate  itself  into  poetry;  it  seemed  to  become  tongue-tied 
in  metre. 

And,  also,  there  was  in  Scott  a  love  of  locality,  which  was 
perhaps  more  deeply  rooted  in  him  than  his  love  of  nature, 
just  as  his  love  of  castles  and  armour  and  the  bricabrac  of 
medisevalism  which  filled  his  brain  and  his  house  was  more 
deeply  rooted  than  his  love  of  the  Middle  Ages.  'If,'  said  Cole- 
ridge to  Payne  Collier, '  I  were  called  upon  to  form  an  opinion 
of  Mr.  Scott's  poetry,  the  first  thing  I  would  do  would  be  to 
take  away  all  his  names  of  old  castles,  which  rhyme  very 


118     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

prettily,  and  read  very  picturesquely;  next,  I  would  exclude 
the  mention  of  all  nunneries,  abbeys,  and  priories,  and  I 
should  then  see  what  would  be  the  residuum  —  how  much 
poetry  would  remain.'  In  all  these  things  there  was  personal 
sincerity ;  Scott  was  following  his  feeling,  his  bias ;  but  it  has 
to  be  determined  how  far,  and  in  how  many  instances,  when 
he  said  nature  he  meant  locality,  and  when  he  said  chivalry 
or  romance,  he  meant  that  'procession  of  my  furniture,  in 
which  old  swords,  bows,  targets,  and  lances  made  a  very  con- 
spicuous show/  on  the  way  to  Abbotsford. 

Ruskin's  special  praise  of  Scott,  in  his  attitude  toward  na- 
ture, is  that  Scott  did  not  indulge  in  '  the  pathetic  fallacy '  of 
reading  one's  own  feelings  into  the  aspect  of  natural  things. 
This,  in  the  main,  is  true,  in  spite  of  those  little  morals  which 
Scott  attaches  to  what  he  sees.  But  it  is  hardly  more  than  a 
negative  merit,  at  the  best ;  and  it  is  accompanied  by  no  inti- 
macy of  insight,  no  revealing  passion;  aspects  are  described 
truthfully,  and  with  sympathy,  and  that  is  all. 

Throughout  the  whole  of  his  long  poems,  and  throughout 
almost  the  whole  of  his  work  in  verse,  Scott  remains  an  im- 
proviser  in  rhyme,  not  a  poet.  But  in  a  few  of  the  songs  con- 
tained in  the  novels,  songs  written  after  he  had  practically 
given  up  writing  verse,  flickering  touches  of  something  very 
like  poetry  are  from  time  to  time  seen.  In  one  song  of  four 
stanzas,  'Proud  Maisie,'  published  in  1818  in  the  'Heart  of 
Midlothian,'  Scott  seems  to  me  to  have  become  a  poet.  In 
this  poem,  which  is  like  nothing  else  he  ever  wrote,  some 
divine  accident  has  brought  all  the  diffused  poetical  feeling 
of  his  nature  to  a  successful  birth.  Landor,  who  seems  to  have 
overlooked  this  perfect  lyric,  thought  there  was  one  line  of 
genuine  poetry  in  Scott's  verse,  which  he  quotes  from  an 
early  poem  on  Helvellyn.  But  I  cannot  feel  that  this  line  is 
more  than  a  pathetic  form  of  rhetoric.  In  '  Proud  Maisie '  we 
get,  for  once,  poetry. 

For  the  rest,  all  Scott's  verse  is  written  for  boys,  and  boys, 


JAMES  MONTGOMERY  119 

generation  after  generation,  will  love  it  with  the  same  fresh- 
ness of  response.  It  has  adventure,  manliness,  bright  land- 
scape, fighting,  the  obvious  emotions ;  it  is  like  a  gallop  across 
the  moors  in  a  blithe  wind ;  it  has  plenty  of  story,  and  is  almost 
as  easily  read  as  if  it  were  prose.  The  taste  for  it  may  well  be 
outgrown  with  the  first  realisation  of  why  Shakespeare  is 
looked  upon  as  the  supreme  poet.  Byron  usually  follows 
Scott  in  the  boy's  head,  and  drives  out  Scott,  as  that  infinitely 
greater,  though  imperfect,  force  may  well  do.  Shelley  often 
completes  the  disillusion.  But  it  is  well,  perhaps,  that  there 
should  be  a  poet  for  boys,  and  for  those  grown-up  people  who 
are  most  like  boys ;  for  those,  that  is,  to  whom  poetry  appeals 
by  something  in  it  which  is  not  the  poetry. 


JAMES    MONTGOMERY    (1771-1854)  * 

Throughout  Montgomery's  too  copious  work,  which  varies 
from  being  almost  or  quite  good  to  being  scarcely  existent, 
there  is  a  thin  but  natural  stream  of  poetical  feeling,  not 
enough  to  make  him  a  considerable  poet,  but  setting  him  apart 
from  such  versifiers  as  his  namesake,  Robert  Montgomery, 
and  other  pious  companions,  such  as  Kirke  White.  It  was  part 
of  Montgomery's  pride  to  realise  that  he  had  not  merely  aimed 
at  being  a  poet,  and  it  is  to  the  credit  of  his  sincerity  that  he 
should  have  realised  the  fact  as  well  as  the  intention.  All 
through  his  life  he  was  a  fighter,  not  only  in  his  poems,  on 
behalf  of  freedom  and  justice.  His  poem  on  'The  West  In- 
dies,' though  indignation,  as  he  admitted,  'gave  to  the  versi- 
fication the  character  of  loud  public  speaking,'  is  as  fervid  as 
Whittier;  and  the  later  'Climbing  Boy's  Soliloquies,'  had 
they  been  much  shorter,  would  have  had  real  merit  of  a 

1  (1)  The  Ocean,   1805.     (2)    The  Wanderer    of    Svritzerland,  1806. 

(3)  The  West    Indies,   1809.     (4)  The  World  before  the  Flood,  1812. 

(5)  Greenland,  1819.  (6)  The  Pelican  Island,  1826.  (7)  Hymns,  1853. 
(8)  Selected  Works,  1841. 


120     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

natural  human  kind.  It  was  Montgomery  who  edited  'The 
Chimney-Sweepers'  Annual/  to  which  Lamb  sent  Blake's 
poem  as  well  as  his  own.  It  is  with  truth  that  he  says  of  these 
and  other  poems : '  It  appealed  to  universal  principles,  to  im- 
perishable affections,  to  primary  elements  of  our  common 
nature.'  He  says  further :  '  My  small  plot  of  ground  is  no  more 
than  Naboth's  vineyard  to  Ahab's  Kingdom;  but  it  is  my 
own,  it  is  no  copyhold ;  I  borrowed  it,  I  leased  it,  from  none. 
.  .  .  The  secret  of  my  moderate  success,  I  consider  to  have 
been  the  right  direction  of  my  abilities  to  right  objects.' 

Now  here  there  is  perhaps  a  certain  confusion  in  the  mind 
between  what  concerns  a  right  object  and  a  successful  poem. 
And  is  this  small  plot  of  ground  so  entirely  unmortgaged  as 
we  are  assured?  Various  influences  are  to  be  seen:  the  influ- 
ences of  Cowper,  of  Wordsworth's  '  Lyrical  Ballads,'  of  what- 
ever was  best  in  Southey.  The  simple  humour  of  such  a  poem 
as  the  '  Soliloquy  of  a  Water-Wagtail '  suggests  Southey ;  the 
fine  qualities  of  'The  Common  Lot'  are  akin,  by  the  prose 
side,  to  Wordsworth,  of  whom  it  has  the  grave  speech,  without 
the  unaccountable  poetry.  There  are  other  such  poems 
which  may  well  still  have  their  appeal  to  the  audience  from 
whom  he  looked  for  remembrance,  '  the  young,  the  fair,  and 
the  devout ' ;  poems  which  are  as  full  of  pleasant  thought  and 
fancy  as  the  dialogues  of  'Birds,'  and  at  times  with  some- 
thing of  the  prim  meditation  of  Matthew  Arnold.  Thought, 
of  a  carefully  religious  kind,  there  always  is,  and  it  is  genuine, 
touched  with  a  sense  of  beauty  and  meaning  in  visible  things, 
to  which  he  is  sometimes  able  to  give  adequate  expression  in 
a  lyric,  but  which  is  lost  or  diluted  in  the  long  poems  on  which 
he  probably  supposed  that  his  fame  would  rest :  '  The  World 
before  the  Flood,'  'Greenland,'  'The  Pelican  Island.'  Much 
of  the  moralising  has  come  to  weary  us,  and  the  smooth  ca- 
dences seem  to  have  been  picked  out  on  the  keyboard  of  an 
early  pianoforte.  There  is  something  in  the  whole  form,  easy 
and  natural  as  it  generally  is,  that  has  a  little  the  air  of  a  thing 


MRS.  TIGHE  121 

remembered  rather  than  newly  made.   Here,  for  instance,  is 
the  typical  Montgomery :  — 

'  The  Dead  are  like  the  stars  by  day ; 
Withdrawn  from  mortal  eye, 
But  not  extinct,  they  hold  their  way 
In  glory  through  the  sky.' 

Thus,  it  is  with  no  surprise  that  we  find  his  most  satis- 
fying work  in  his  translation  of  the  Psalms  in  the  form  of 
hymns.  They  have  been  adopted,  I  believe,  for  congregational 
singing  by  the  churches  of  all  denominations.  Nothing  could 
be  better  suited  for  the  purpose  than,  for  instance,  the  ver- 
sion of  Psalm  lxxvi,  'Hail  to  the  Lord's  anointed.'  I  do  not 
say  that  anything  like  justice  is  done  to  the  great  poetry  of 
the  original,  as  we  read  it  in  the  incomparable  prose  of  the 
English  Bible.  The  greatest  of  English  poets  never  has  done 
and  never  will  do  that.  But,  in  such  renderings  as  these,  done 
for  singing,  there  is  a  swiftness,  an  easy  flow,  together  with 
a  real  fidelity  to  the  original,  which  it  is  unusual  to  find  in 
professedly  pious  work.  To  see  how  easily  the  attempt  to 
deal  with  Biblical  material,  whether  in  the  form  of  transla- 
tion or  adaptation,  can  turn  to  rhetoric,  make-believe,  or 
some  other  sort  of  insincerity,  we  need  only  look  at  the  experi- 
ments of  Moore  and  all  but  the  best  of  Byron's.  Montgomery 
does  his  useful  pedestrian  work  competently. 


MRS.  TIGHE  (1772-1810)  l 

Mrs.  Tighe  was  one  of  the  most  famous  of  the  women  poets 
of  her  period.  She  is  chiefly  remembered  now  because  the  very 
early  Keats  seems  to  have  thought  her  a  poet  almost  worth 
imitating.  But  not  long  after  he  could  say :  '  Mrs.  Tighe  and 
Beattie  once  delighted  me  —  now  I  see  through  them  and  can 
find  nothing  in  them  or  weakness,  and  yet  how  many  they  still 
delight.'  Her  chief  and  most  popular  composition  was  a 
1  Psyche ;  or  the  Legend  of  Love,  1805,  1811. 


122     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'Psyche,'  done  at  a  great  distance  after  Apuleius,  but  not 
without  a  kind  of  fanciful  female  prettiness.  The  luxury  of  her 
picture-painting,  the  smoothness  of  her  Spenserian  stanzas, 
her  fluent  feeling,  — 

'  And  all  that  can  the  female  heart  delight,' 
had  a  natural  attraction  for  an  audience  which  began  with 
Moore  and  ended  with  Mrs.  Hemans. 


HENRY  FRANCIS  CARY  (1772-1844)  * 

Henry  Francis  Cary,  a  busy  man  of  letters  in  his  time,  is  re- 
membered by  only  one  of  his  many  excellent  translations,  the 
still  unsurpassed  version  of  the  Divine  Comedy  of  Dante.  But 
there  is  real  merit  in  the  translation  of  the  '  Birds '  of  Aristo- 
phanes, which,  for  its  speed  and  its  good  homely  burlesque 
English  words,  has  its  place  somewhere  between  Mitchell  and 
Frere.  Better  still  are  the  translations  from  'Early  French 
Poets,'  from  Marot  to  Gringoire,  for  the  most  part  in  the  metres 
of  the  original.  The  book  has  not  been  replaced  since,  and 
should  be  reprinted  for  its  choice  anthology,  in  French  and 
English,  and  its  well  aware  and  sympathetic  narrative  of  poets 
who  are  hardly  better  known  now  than  then.  Cary  shows  the 
true  translator's  energy,  agility,  and  quick  sense  of  words 
and  rhythms,  and  without  being  exactly  a  poet  he  conveys 
from  one  language  to  another  a  great  deal  more  than  mere 
substance  or  mere  form.  Who,  before  Rossetti,  could  have 
done  Villon  so  well  into  English  verse? 

'Where  is  Heloise  the  wise, 
For  whom  Abelard  was  fain, 
Mangled  in  such  cruel  wise, 
To  turn  a  monk  instead  of  man?' 

1  (1)  Ode  to  Lord  Heathfield,  1787.  (2)  Poems,  1788.  (3)  Sonnets 
and  Odes,  1788.  (4)  Ode  to  General  Kosciusko,  1797.  (5)  Inferno  of 
Dante,  1805.  (6)  The  Vision;  or  Hell,  Purgatory,  and  Paradise,  of  Dante 
Alighieri,  3  vols.,  1814.  (7)  Pindar,  1824.  (8)  Birds  of  Aristophanes, 
1824.  (9)  The  Early  French  Poets,  1846. 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  123 

The  only  lines  which  he  attempts  from  another  ballad  have  the 
strong,  direct,  faithful  quality  of  his  Dante.  I  give  the  best  of 
them :  — 

'As  to  our  flesh,  which  once  too  well  we  fed, 
That  now  is  rotten  quite,  and  mouldered; 
And  we,  the  bones,  do  turn  to  dust  and  clay. 
None  laugh  at  us  that  are  so  ill  bested, 
But  pray  ye  God  to  do  our  sins  away.' 

Cary  published  the  first  part  of  his  translation  of  what  he 
called  'The  Vision;  or,  Hell,  Purgatory,  and  Paradise/  in 
1805,  and  the  whole  trilogy  in  1814.  To  translate  Dante  is  an 
impossible  thing,  for  to  do  it  would  demand,  as  the  first  re- 
quirement, a  concise  and  luminous  style  equal  to  Wordsworth 
at  his  best,  as  when  he  said  (it  should  have  been  said  of 
Dante) :  — 

'Thy  soul  was  like  a  star,  and  dwelt  apart.' 

The  style  and  cadence  of  Dante  were  beyond  the  best  skill 
of  Cary;  but  what  he  did  was  to  turn  the  Italian  poem  into  an 
English  one,  to  a  certain  degree  Miltonic,  but  faithful  to  the 
simplicity  of  the  words  and  turns  of  speech  in  the  original. 
Only  the  complete  version  of  Cary,  and  the  daring  experi- 
ment of  Dr.  Shadwell,who  has  rendered  the  '  Purgatorio  \  into 
the  metre  of  Marvell's  great  ode,  have  succeeded  in  the  one 
thing  most  necessary:  that  a  poem  should  not  cease  to  be  a 
poem  on  being  transferred  into  another  language.  Cary's 
great  task,  which  he  fulfilled,  was  to  do  this  service  to  Dante 
and  to  England. 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE   (1772-1834)  l 

In  one  of  Rossetti's  invaluable  notes  on  poetry,  he  tells  us 
that  to  him  'the  leading  point  about  Coleridge's  work  is  its 
human  love.'   We  may  remember  Coleridge's  own  words :  — 

1  (1)  The  Fall  of  Robespierre,  1794.  (2)  Poems  on  Various  Subjects 
(together  with  four  poems  by  Charles  Lamb),  1796.  (3)  Ode  on  the  Depart- 
ing Year,  1796.     (4)  Poems  by  S.  T.  Coleridge,  Second  Edition  (together 


124     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'  To  be  beloved  is  all  I  need, 
And  whom  I  love  I  love  indeed.' 

Yet  love,  though  it  is  the  word  which  he  uses  of  himself,  is  not 
really  what  he  himself  meant  when  using  it,  but  rather  an 
affectionate sympathy,  in  which  there  seems  to  have  been  little 
element  of  passion.  Writing  to  his  wife,  during  that  first  ab- 
sence in  Germany,  whose  solitude  tried  him  so  much,  he 
laments  that  there  is  'no  one  to  love.'  'Love  is  the  vital  air 
of  my  genius,'  he  tells  her,  and  adds:  'I  am  deeply  convinced 
that  if  I  were  to  remain  a  few  years  among  objects  for  whom 
I  had  no  affection,  I  should  wholly  lose  the  powers  of  intellect.' 
With  this  incessant,  passionless  sensibility,  it  was  not  un- 
natural that  his  thirst  for  friendship  was  stronger  than  his 
need  of  love ;  that  to  him  friendship  was  hardly  distinguishable 
from  love.  Throughout  all  his  letters  there  is  a  series  of  cause- 
less explosions  of  emotion,  which  it  is  hardly  possible  to  take 
seriously,  but  which,  far  from  being  insincere,  is  really,  no 
doubt,  the  dribbling  overflow  of  choked-up  feelings,  a  sort  of 
moral  leakage.  It  might  be  said  of  Coleridge,  in  the  phrase 
which  he  used  of  Nelson,  that  he  was  'heart-starved.'  Tied  for 
life  to  a  woman  with  whom  he  had  not  one  essential  sympathy, 
the  whole  of  his  nature  was  put  out  of  focus ;  and  perhaps 
nothing  but  'the  joy  of  grief,'  and  the  terrible  and  fettering 
power  of  luxuriating  over  his  own  sorrows,  and  tracing  them 
to  first  principles,  outside  himself  or  in  the  depths  of  his  sub- 
consciousness, gave  him  the  courage  to  support  that  long 
ever-present  divorce. 

with  Poems  by  Charles  Lamb  and  Charles  Lloyd),  1797.  (5)  Fears  in 
Solitude,  1798.  (6)  The  Piccolomini,  or  the  First  Part  of  Wallenstein. 
Translated  from  the  German  of  Friedrich  von  Schiller,  1800.  (7)  Poems. 
Third  Edition,  1803.  (8)  Remorse,  1813.  (9)  Christabel :  Kubla  Khan, 
a  Vision:  The  Pains  of  Sleep,  1816.  (10)  Sibylline  Leaves :  a  Collection 
of  Poems,  1817.  (11)  Zapolya,  1817.  (12)  Poetical  Works,  3  vols., 
1828,  1829,  1834.  (13)  Poems,  1848.  (14)  Poems,  edited  by  Derwent 
and  Sara  Coleridge,  1852  (1870).  (15)  Dramatic  Works,  1852.  (16) 
Poetical  and  Dramatic  Works,  4  vols.,  1877.  (17)  Poetical  Works,  edited 
by  J.  Dykes  Campbell,  1899. 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE 


125 


Both  for  his  good  and  evil,  he  had  never  been  able  to  endure 
emotion  without  either  diluting  or  intensifying  it  with  thought, 
and  with  always  self-conscious  thought.  He  uses  identically 
the  same  words  in  writing  his  last,  deeply  moved  letter  to 
Mary  Evans,  and  in  relating  the  matter  to  Southey.  He  can- 
not get  away  from  words;  coming  as  near  to  sincerity  as  he 
can,  words  are  always  between  him  and  his  emotion.  Hence 
his  over-emphasis,  his  rhetoric  of  humility.  In  1794  he  writes 
to  his  brother  George :  '  Mine  eyes  gush  out  with  tears,  m} 
heart  is  sick  and  languid  with  the  weight  of  unmerited  kind 
ness.'  Nine  days  later  he  writes  to  his  brother  James :  '  M3J 
conduct  towards  you,  and  towards  my  other  brothers,  has 
displayed  a  strange  combination  of  madness,  ingratitude,  anc 
dishonesty.  But  you  forgive  me.  May  my  Maker  forgive  me 
May  the  time  arrive  when  I  shall  have  forgiven  myself! 
Here  we  see  both  what  he  calls  his  '  gangrened  sensibility '  an( 
a  complete  abandonment  to  the  feelings  of  the  moment.  It  ii 
always  a  self-conscious  abandonment,  during  which  he  watchei 
himself  with  approval,  and  seems  to  be  saying:  'Now  that  is; 
truly  "feeling  "  ! '  He  can  never  concentrate  himself  on  an} 
emotion ;  he  swims  about  in  floods  of  his  own  tears.  With  so 
little  sense  of  reality  in  an3rthing,  he  has  no  sense  of  the  real- 
ity of  direct  emotion,  but  is  preoccupied,  from  the  moment! 
of  the  first  shock,  in  exploring  it  for  its  universal  principle, 
and  then  flourishes  it  almost  in  triumph  at  what  he  has  dis- 
covered. This  is  not  insincerity;  it  is  the  metaphysical,  ana- 
lytical, and  parenthetic  mind  in  action.  '  I  have  endeavoured 
to  feel  what  I  ought  to  feel,'  he  once  significantly  writes. 

Coleridge  had  many  friends,  to  some  of  whom,  as  to  Lamb, 
his  friendship  was  the  most  priceless  thing  in  life;  but  the 
friendship  which  meant  most  to  him,  not  only  as  a  man,  but  as 
a  poet,  was  the  friendship  with  Wordsworth  and  with  Dorothy 
Wordsworth.  'There  is  a  sense  of  the  word  Love/  he  wrote 
to  Wordsworth  in  1812,  'in  which  I  never  felt  it  but  to  you 
and  one  of  your  household.'  After  his  quarrel  in  that  year  he 


126     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

has  'an  agony  of  weeping.'  'After  fifteen  years  of  such  reli- 
gious, almost  superstitious  idolatry  and  self-sacrifice ! '  he 
laments.  Now  it  was  during  his  first,  daily  companionship 
with  the  Wordsworths  that  he  wrote  almost  all  his  greatest 
work.  The  'Ancient  Mariner'  and  'Christabel'  were  both 
written  in  a  kind  of  rivalry  with  Wordsworth ;  and  the  '  Ode 
on  Dejection '  was  written  after  four  months'  absence  from 
him,  in  the  first  glow  and  encouragement  of  a  return  to  that 
one  inspiring  comradeship.  Wordsworth  was  the  only  poet 
among  his  friends  whom  he  wholly  admired,  and  Wordsworth 
was  more  exclusively  a  poet,  more  wholly  absorbed  in  think- 
ing poetry  and  thinking  about  poetry,  and  in  a  thoroughly 
practical  way,  than  almost  any  poet  who  has  ever  lived.  It 
was  not  only  for  his  solace  in  life  that  Coleridge  required 
sympathy ;  he  needed  the  galvanising  of  continual  intercourse 
with  a  poet,  and  with  one  to  whom  poetry  was  the  only  thing 
of  importance.  Coleridge,  when  he  was  by  himself,  was  never 
sure  of  this ;  there  was  his  magnum  opus,  the  revelation  of  all 
philosophy;  and  he  sometimes  has  doubts  of  the  worth  of  his 
own  poetry.  Had  Coleridge  been  able  to  live  uninterruptedly 
in  the  company  of  the  Wordsworths,  even  with  the  unsym- 
pathetic wife  at  home,  the  opium  in  the  cupboard,  and  the 
magnum  opus  on  the  desk,  I  am  convinced  that  we  should 
have  had  for  our  reading  to-day  all  those  poems  which  went 
down  with  him  into  silence. 

What  Coleridge  lacked  was  what  theologians  call  a  'saving 
belief '  in  Christianity,  or  else  a  strenuous  intellectual  immo- 
rality. He  imagined  himself  to  believe  in  Christianity,  but  his 
belief  never  realised  itself  in  effective  action,  either  in  the 
mind  or  in  conduct,  while  it  frequently  clogged  his  energies 
by  weak  scruples  and  restrictions  which  were  but  so  many 
internal  irritations.  He  calls  upon  the  religion  which  he  has 
never  firmly  apprehended  to  support  him  under  some  mis- 
fortune of  his  own  making;  it  does  not  support  him,  but  he 
finds  excuses  for  his  weakness  in  what  seem  to  him  its  pro- 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  127 

mises  of  help.  Coleridge  was  not  strong  enough  to  be  a  Chris- 
tian, and  he  was  not  strong  enough  to  rely  on  the  impulses  of 
his  own  nature,  and  to  turn  his  failings  into  a  very  actual  kind 
of  success.  When  Blake  said,  'If  the  fool  would  persist  in  his 
folly  he  would  become  wise/  he  expressed  a  profound  truth 
which  Nietzsche  and  others  have  done  little  more  than  amplify. 
There  is  nothing  so  hopeless  as  inert  or  inactive  virtue :  it  is  a 
form  of  life  grown  putrid,  and  it  turns  into  poisonous,  decay- 
ing matter  in  the  soul.  If  Coleridge  had  been  more  callous 
towards  what  he  felt  to  be  his  duties,  if  he  had  not  merely 
neglected  them,  as  he  did,  but  justified  himself  for  neglecting 
them,  on  any  ground  of  intellectual  or  physical  necessity,  or 
if  he  had  merely  let  them  slide  without  thought  or  regret, 
he  would  have  been  more  complete,  more  effectual,  as  a 
man,  and  he  might  have  achieved  more  finished  work  as  an 
artist. 

To  Coleridge  there  was  as  much  difficulty  in  belief  as  in 
action,  for  belief  is  itself  an  action  of  the  mind.  He  was  always 
anxious  to  believe  anything  that  would  carry  him  beyond  the 
limits  of  time  and  space,  but  it  was  not  often  that  he  could 
give  more  than  a  speculative  assent  to  even  the  most  improb- 
able of  creeds.  Always  seeking  fixity,  his  mind  was  too  fluid 
for  any  anchor  to  hold  in  it.  He  drifted  from  speculation  to 
speculation,  often  seeming  to  forget  his  aim  by  the  way,  in 
almost  the  collector's  delight  over  the  curiosities  he  had  found 
in  passing.  On  one  page  of  his  letters  he  writes  earnestly  to 
the  atheist  Thelwall  in  defence  of  Christianity;  on  another 
page  we  find  him  saying,  '  My  Spinosism  (if  Spinosism  it  be, 
and  i'  faith  't  is  very  like  it) ' ;  and  then  comes  the  solemn 
assurance:  'IamaBerkeleyan.'  Southey,  in  his  rough, uncom- 
prehending way,  writes :  '  Hartley  was  ousted  by  Berkeley, 
Berkeley  by  Spinoza,  and  Spinoza  by  Plato ;  when  last  I  saw 
him  Jacob  Behmen  had  some  chance  of  coming  in.  The  truth 
is  that  he  plaj^s  with  systems ' ;  so  it  seemed  to  Southey,  who 
could  see  no  better.    To  Coleridge  all  systems  were  of  impor- 


12S     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

tance,  because  in  every  system  there  was  its  own  measure  of 
truth.  He  was  always  setting  his  mind  to  think  about  itself, 
and  felt  that  he  worked  both  hard  and  well  if  he  had  gained 
a  clearer  glimpse  into  that  dark  cavern.  '  Yet  I  have  not  been 
altogether  idle/  he  writes  in  December,  1800,  'having  in  my 
own  conceit  gained  great  light  into  several  parts  of  the  human 
mind  which  have  hitherto  remained  either  wholly  unexplained 
or  most  falsely  explained.'  In  March,  1801,  he  declares  that 
he  has  '  completely  extricated  the  notions  of  time  and  space.' 
'This,'  he  says, '  I  have  done ;  but  I  trust  that  I  am  about  to  do 
more  —  namely,  that  I  shall  be  able  to  evolve  all  the  five 
senses,  and  to  state  their  growth  and  the  causes  of  their  differ- 
ence, and  in  this  evolvement  to  solve  the  process  of  life  and 
consciousness.'  He  hopes  that  before  his  thirtieth  year  he  will 
'thoroughly  understand  the  whole  of  Nature's  works.'  'My 
opinion  is  this/  he  says,  defining  one  part  at  least  of  his  way 
of  approach  to  truth, '  that  deep  thinking  is  attainable  only  by 
a  man  of  deep  feeling,  and  that  all  truth  is  a  species  of  revela- 
tion.' On  the  other  hand,  he  assures  us,  speaking  of  that 
magnum  opus  which  weighed  upon  him  and  supported  him 
to  the  end  of  his  life,  'the  very  object  throughout  from  the 
first  page  to  the  last  [is]  to  reconcile  the  dictates  of  common 
sense  with  the  conclusions  of  scientific  reasoning.' 
\J  This  magnum  opus,  '  a  work  which  should  contain  all  know- 
ledge and  proclaim  all  philosophy,  had/  says  Mr.  Ernest  Cole- 
ridge, '  been  Coleridge's  dream  from  the  beginning.'  Only  a  few 
months  before  his  death,  we  find  him  writing  to  John  Sterling : 
'  Many  a  fond  dream  have  I  amused  mj^self  with,  of  your  re- 
siding near  me,  or  in  the  same  house,  and  of  preparing,  with 
your  and  Mr.  Green's  assistance,  my  whole  system  for  the 
press,  as  far  as  it  exists  in  any  systematic  form ;  that  is,  begin- 
ning with  the  Propyleum,  On  the  Power  and  Use  of  Words, 
comprising  Logic,  as  the  Canons  of  Conclusion,  as  the  criterion 
of  Premises,  and  lastly  as  the  discipline  and  evolution  of  Ideas 
(and  then  the  Methodus  et  Epochee,  or  the  Disquisition  on 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  129 

God,  Nature,  and  Man),  the  two  first  grand  divisions  of  which, 
from  the  Ens  super  Ens  to  the  Fall,  or  from  God  to  Hades,  and 
then  from  Chaos  to  the  commencement  of  living  organization, 
containing  the  whole  of  the  Dynamic  Philosophy,  and  the 
deduction  of  the  Powers  and  Forces,  are  complete.'  Twenty 
years  earlier,  he  had  written  to  Daniel  Stuart  that  he  was 
keeping  his  morning  hours  sacred  to  his  'most  important 
Work,  which  is  printing  at  Bristol,'  as  he  imagined.  It  was 
then  to  be  called  'Christianity,  the  one  true  Philosophy,  or 
Five  Treatises  on  the  Logos,  or  Communicative  Intelligence, 
natural,  human,  and  divine.'  Of  this  vast  work  only  fragments 
remain,  mostly  unpublished:  two  large  quarto  volumes  on 
logic,  a  volume  intended  as  an  introduction,  a  commentary  on 
the  Gospels  and  some  of  the  Epistles,  together  with  '  innumer- 
able fragments  of  metaphysical  and  theological  speculation.' 
But  out  of  those  fragments  no  system  was  ever  to  be  con- 
structed, though  a  fervent  disciple,  J.  H.  Green,  devoted 
twenty-eight  years  to  the  attempt.  '  Christabel '  unfinished, 
the  magnum  opus  unachieved:  both  were  but  parallel  symp- 
toms of  a  mind  '  thought-bewildered '  to  the  end,  and  bewil- 
dered by  excess  of  light  and  by  crowding  energies  always  in 
conflict,  always  in  escape. 

Coleridge's  search,  throughout  his  life,  was  after  the  abso- 
lute, an  absolute  not  only  in  thought,  but  in  all  human  rela- 
tions, in  love,  friendship,  faith  in  man,  faith  in  God,  faith  in 
beauty;  and  while  it  was  this  profound  dissatisfaction  with 
Tess  than  the  perfect  form  of  every  art,  passion,  thought,  or 
"circumstance,  that  set  him  adrift  in  life,  making  him  seem 
untrue  to  duty,  conviction,  and  himself,  it  was  this  also  that 
formed  in  him  the  double  existence  of  the  poet  and  the  phi- 
losopher, each  supplementing  and  interpenetrating  the  other. 
The  poet  and  the  philosopher  are  but  two  aspects  of  one  real- 
ity; or  rather,  the  poetic  and  the  philosophic  attitudes  are  but 
two  ways  of  seeing.  The  poet  who  is  not  also  a  philosopher 
is  like  a  flower  without  a  root.  Both  seek  the  same  infinitude ; 


130     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

one  apprehending  the  idea,  the  other  the  image.  One  seeks 
truth  for  its  beauty;  the  other  finds  beauty,  an  abstract,  in- 
tellectual beauty,  in  the  innermost  home  of  truth.  Poetry 
and  metaphysics  are  alike  a  disengaging,  for  different  ends, 
of  the  absolute  element  in  things. 

In  Coleridge,  metaphysics  joined  with  an  unbounded  im- 
agination, in  equal  flight  from  reality,  from  the  notions  of 
time  and  space.  Each  was  an  equal  denial  of  the  reality  of 
what  we  call  real  things;  the  one  experimental,  searching, 
reasoning;  the  other  a  'shaping  spirit  of  imagination/  an  em- 
bodying force.  His  sight  was  always  straining  into  the  dark- 
ness; and  he  has  himself  noted  that  from  earliest  childhood 
his  'mind  was  habituated  to  the  Vast.'  'I  never  regarded  my 
senses/  he  says, 'as  the  criteria  of  my  belief  ;  and  'those  who 
have  been  led  to  the  same  truths  step  by  step,  through  the 
constant  testimony  of  their  senses,  seem  to  want  a  sense  which 
I  possess.'  To  Coleridge  only  mind  existed,  an  eternal  and  an 
eternally  active  thought;  and  it  was  as  a  corollary  to  his 
philosophical  conception  of  the  universe  that  he  set  his  mind 
to  a  conscious  re-building  of  the  world  in  space.  His  magic, 
that  which  makes  his  poetry,  was  but  the  final  release  in  art 
of  a  winged  thought  fluttering  helplessly  among  speculations 
and  theories ;  it  was  the  song  of  release. 

De  Quincey  has  said  of  Coleridge : '  I  believe  it  to  be  notori- 
ous that  he  first  began  the  use  of  opium,  not  as  a  relief  from 
any  bodily  pains  or  nervous  irritations  —  for  his  constitution 
was  strong  and  excellent  —  but  as  a  source  of  luxurious  sen- 
sations.' Hartley  Coleridge,  in  the  biographical  supplement 
to  the  '  Biographia  Literaria/  replies  with  what  we  now  know 
to  be  truth : '  If  my  Father  sought  more  from  opium  than  the 
mere  absence  of  pain,  I  feel  assured  that  it  was  not  luxurious 
sensations  or  the  glowing  phantasmagoria  of  passive  dreams ; 
but  that  the  power  of  the  medicine  might  keep  down  the  agita- 
tions of  his  nervous  system,  like  a  strong  hand  grasping  the 
strings  of  some  shattered  lyre.'   In  1795,  that  is,  at  the  age 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  131 

of  twenty-three,  we  find  him  taking  laudanum;  in  1796,  he  is 
taking  it  in  large  doses;  by  the  late  spring  of  1801  he  is  under 
the  '  fearful  slavery,'  as  he  was  to  call  it,  of  opium.  '  My  sole 
sensuality,'  he  says  of  this  time,  'was  not  to  be  in  pain.'  In  a 
terrible  letter  addressed  to  Joseph  Cottle  in  1814  he  declares 
that  he  was  '  seduced  to  the  accursed  habit  ignorantly ' ;  and 
he  describes  'the  direful  moment,  when  my  pulse  began  to 
fluctuate,  my  heart  to  palpitate,  and  such  a  dreadful  falling 
abroad,  as  it  were,  of  my  whole  frame,  such  intolerable  rest- 
lessness, and  incipient  bewilderment  ...  for  my  case  is  a 
species  of  madness,  only  that  it  is  a  derangement,  an  utter  im- 
potence of  the  volition,  and  not  of  the  intellectual  faculties.' 
And,  throughout,  it  is  always  the  pains,  never  the  pleasures, 
of  opium  that  he  registers.  Opium  took  hold  of  him  by  what 
was  inert  in  his  animal  nature,  and  not  by  any  active  sensual- 
ity. His  imagination  required  no  wings,  but  rather  fetters; 
and  it  is  evident  that  opium  was  more  often  a  sedative  than  a 
spur  to  his  senses. 

The  effect  of  opium  on  the  normal  man  is  to  bring  him  into 
something  like  the  state  in  which  Coleridge  habitually  lived. 
The  world  was  always  a  sufficiently  unreal  thing  to  him,  facts 
more  than  remote  enough,  consequences  unrelated  to  their 
causes ;  he  lived  in  a  mist,  and  opium  thickened  the  mist  to  a 
dense  yellow  fog.  Opium  might  have  helped  to  make  Southey 
a  poet ;  it  left  Coleridge  the  prisoner  of  a  cobweb-net  of  dreams. 
What  he  wanted  was  some  astringent  force  in  things,  to  tighten, 
not  to  loosen,  the  always  expanding  and  uncontrollable  limits 
of  his  mind.  Opium  did  but  confirm  what  the  natural  habits 
of  his  constitution  had  bred  in  him :  an  overwhelming  indolence, 
out  of  which  the  energies  that  still  arose  intermittently  were 
no  longer  flames,  but  the  escaping  ghosts  of  flame,  mere  black 
smoke. 

At  twenty-four,  in  a  disinterested  description  of  himself  for 
the  benefit  of  a  friend  whom  he  had  not  yet  met,  he  declares, 
'The  walk  of  the  whole  man  indicates  indolence  capable  of 


132    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

energies'  It  was  that  walk  which  Carlyle  afterwards  described, 
unable  to  keep  to  either  side  of  the  garden-path.  'The  moral 
obligation  is  to  me  so  very  strong  a  stimulant,'  Coleridge 
writes  to  Crabb  Robinson, '  that  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  it  acts 
as  a  narcotic.  The  blow  that  should  rouse,  stuns  me.'  He  plays 
another  variation  on  the  ingenious  theme  in  a  letter  to  his 
brother : '  Anxieties  that  stimulate  others  infuse  an  additional 
narcotic  into  my  mind.  .  .  .  Like  some  poor  labourer,  whose 
night's  sleep  has  but  imperfectly  refreshed  his  over-wearied 
frame,  I  have  sate  in  drowsy  uneasiness,  and  doing  nothing 
have  thought  what  a  deal  I  have  to  do.'  His  ideal,  which  he 
expressed  in  1797  in  a  letter  to  Thelwall,  and,  in  1813,  almost 
word  for  word,  in  a  poem  called  'The  Night-Scene,'  was,  'like 
the  Indian  Vishnu,  to  float  about  along  an  infinite  ocean 
cradled  in  the  flower  of  the  Lotus,  and  wake  once  in  a  million 
years  for  a  few  minutes  just  to  know  that  I  was  going  to  sleep 
a  million  years  more.'  Observe  the  effect  of  the  desire  for  the 
absolute,  reinforced  by  constitutional  indolence,  and  only 
waiting  for  the  illuminating  excuse  of  opium. 

From  these  languors,  and  from  their  consequences,  Cole- 
ridge found  relief  in  conversation,  for  which  he  was  always 
ready,  while  he  was  far  from  always  ready  for  the  more  pre- 
cise mental  exertion  of  writing.  '  Oh,  how  I  wish  to  be  talking, 
not  writing,'  he  cries  in  a  letter  to  Southey  in  1803,  'for  my 
mind  is  so  full,  that  my  thoughts  stifle  and  jam  each  other.' 
And,  in  1816,  in  his  first  letter  to  Gillman,  he  writes,  more  sig- 
nificantly, 'The  stimulus  of  conversation  suspends  the  terror 
that  haunts  my  mind ;  but  when  I  am  alone,  the  horrors  that 
I  have  suffered  from  laudanum,  the  degradation,  the  blighted 
utility,  almost  overwhelm  me.'  It  was  along  one  avenue  of  this 
continual  escape  from  himself  that  Coleridge  found  himself 
driven  (anywhere,  away  from  action)  towards  what  grew  to  be 
the  main  waste  of  his  life.  Hartley  Coleridge,  in  the  preface  to 
'  Table-Talk,'  has  told  us  eloquently  how, '  throughout  a  long- 
drawn  summer's  day,  would  this  man  talk  to  you  in  low, 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  133 

equable,  but  clear  and  musical  tones,  concerning  things  human 
and  divine' ;  we  know  that  Carlyle  found  him  'unprofitable, 
even  tedious,'  and  wished  'to  worship  him,  and  toss  him  in  a 
blanket ' ;  and  we  have  the  vivid  reporting  of  Keats,  who 
tells  us  that,  on  his  one  meeting  with  Coleridge,  'I  walked  with 
him  at  his  alderman-after-dinner  pace,  for  near  two  miles,  I 
suppose.  In  those  two  miles  he  broached  a  thousand  things. 
Let  me  see  if  I  can  give  you  a  list — nightingales  —  poetry — 
on  poetical  sensation  —  metaphysics  —  different  genera  and 
species  of  dreams  —  nightmare  —  a  dream  accompanied  with 
a  sense  of  touch  —  single  and  double  touch  —  a  dream  re- 
lated —  first  and  second  consciousness  —  the  difference  ex- 
plained between  will  and  volition  —  so  say  metaphysicians 
from  a  want  of  smoking  —  the  second  consciousness  — 
monsters  —  the  Kraken  —  mermaids  —  Southey  believes  in 
them  —  Southey's  belief  too  much  diluted  —  a  ghost  story  — 
Good-morning  —  I  heard  his  voice  as  he  came  towards  me  — 
I  heard  it  as  he  moved  away  —  I  had  heard  it  all  the  interval  — 
if  it  may  be  called  so.'  It  may  be  that  we  have  had  no  more 
wonderful  talker,  and,  no  doubt,  the  talk  had  its  reverential 
listeners,  its  disciples;  but  to  cultivate  or  permit  disciples  is 
itself  a  kind  of  waste,  a  kind  of  weakness ;  it  requires  a  very 
fixed  and  energetic  indolence  to  become,  as  Coleridge  became, 
a  vocal  utterance,  talking  for  talking's  sake. 

But  beside  talking,  there  was  lecturing,  with  Coleridge  a 
scarcely  different  form  of  talk ;  and  it  is  to  this  consequence  of 
a  readiness  to  speak  and  a  reluctance  to  write  that  we  owe 
much  of  his  finest  criticism,  in  the  imperfectly  recorded  '  Lec- 
tures on  Shakespeare.'  Coleridge  as  a  critic  is  not  easily  to  be 
summed  up.  What  may  first  surprise  us,  when  we  begin  to , 
look  into  his  critical  opinions,  is  the  uncertainty  of  his  judge- 
ments in  regard  to  his  own  work,  and  to  the  work  of  his  friends ; 
the  curious  bias  which  a  feeling  or  an  idea,  affection  or  a  phi- 
losophical theory,  could  give  to  his  mind.  His  admiration  for 
Southey,  his  consideration  for  Sotheby,  perhaps  in  a  less  de- 


134     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

gree  his  unconquerable  esteem  for  Bowles,  together  with  some- 
thing very  like  adulation  of  Wordsworth,  are  all  instances  of  a 
certain  loss  of  the  sense  of  proportion.  He  has  left  us  no  pene- 
trating criticisms  of  Byron,  of  Shelley,  or  of  Keats;  and  in  a 
very  interesting  letter  about  Blake,  written  in  1818,  he  is  un- 
able to  take  the  poems  merely  as  poems,  and  chooses  among 
them  with  a  scrupulous  care  '  not  for  the  want  of  innocence 
in  the  poem,  but  from  the  too  probable  want  of  it  in  many 
readers.' 

Lamb,  concerned  only  with  individual  things,  looks  straight 
at  them,  not  through  them,  seeing  them  implacably.  His  notes 
to  the  selections  from  the  Elizabethan  dramatists  are  the  surest 
criticisms  that  we  have  in  English ;  they  go  to  the  roots.  Cole- 
ridge's critical  power  was  wholly  exercised  upon  elements  and 
first  principles;  Lamb  showed  an  infinitely  keener  sense  of 
detail,  of  the  parts  of  the  whole.  Lamb  was  unerring  on  defi- 
nite points,  and  could  lay  his  finger  on  flaws  in  Coleridge's  work 
that  were  invisible  to  Coleridge ;  who,  however,  was  unerring 
in  his  broad  distinctions,  in  the  philosophy  of  his  art. 

'The  ultimate  end  of  criticism/  said  Coleridge,  'is  much 
more  to  establish  the  principles  of  writing  than  to  furnish  rules 
how  to  pass  judgement  on  what  has  been  written  by  others.' 
And  for  this  task  he  had  an  incomparable  foundation :  imagi- 
nation, insight,  logic,  learning,  almost  every  critical  quality 
united  in  one ;  and  he  was  a  poet  who  allowed  himself  to  be  a 
critic.  Those  pages  of  the  '  Biographia  Literaria '  in  which  he 
defines  and  distinguishes  between  imagination  and  fancy, 
the  researches  into  the  abstract  entities  of  poetry  in  the  course 
of  an  examination  of  Wordsworth's  theories  and  of  the  popu- 
lar objections  to  them,  all  that  we  have  of  the  lectures  on 
Shakespeare,  into  which  he  put  an  illuminating  idolatry,  to- 
gether with  notes  and  jottings  preserved  in  the  'Table-Talk,' 
'Anima  Poetae,'  the  'Literary  Remains,'  and  on  the  margins 
of  countless  books,  contain  the  most  fundamental  criticism 
of  literature  that  has  ever  been  attempted,  fragmentary  as  the 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  135 

attempt  remains.  'There  is  not  a  man  in  England/  said  Cole- 
ridge with  truth,  'whose  thoughts,  images,  words,  and  erudi- 
tion have  been  published  in  larger  quantities  than  mine; 
though  I  must  admit,  not  by,  nor  for,  myself.'  He  claimed, 
and  rightly,  as  his  invention,  a  'science  of  reasoning  and  judg- 
ing concerning  the  productions  of  literature,  the  characters 
and  measures  of  public  men,  and  the  events  of  nations,  by  a 
systematic  subsumption  of  them,  under  principles  deduced 
from  the  nature  of  man,'  which,  as  he  says,  was  unknown  be- 
fore the  year  1795.  He  is  the  one  philosophical  critic  who  is 
also  a  poet,  and  thus  he  is  the  one  critic  who  instinctively 
knows  his  way  through  all  the  intricacies  of  the  creative 
mind. 

Most  of  his  best  criticism  circles  around  Shakespeare ;  and  he 
took  Shakespeare  almost  as  frankly  in  the  place  of  Nature,  or  of 
poetry.  He  affirms, '  Shakespeare  knew  the  human  mind,  and 
its  most  minute  and  intimate  workings,  and  he  never  intro- 
duces a  word,  or  a  thought,  in  vain  or  out  of  place.'  This 
granted  (and  to  Coleridge  it  is  essential  that  it  should  be 
granted,  for  in  less  than  the  infinite  he  cannot  find  space  in 
which  to  use  his  wings  freely)  he  has  only  to  choose  and  define, 
to  discover  and  to  illuminate.  In  the  'myriad-minded  man,' 
in  his  'oceanic  mind,'  he  finds  all  the  material  that  he  needs 
for  the  making  of  a  complete  aesthetic.  Nothing  with  Cole- 
ridge ever  came  to  completion ;  but  we  have  only  to  turn  over 
the  pages  about  Shakespeare,  to  come  upon  fragments  worth 
more  than  anyone  else's  finished  work.  I  find  the  whole  secret 
of  Shakespeare's  way  of  writing  in  these  sentences :  '  Shake- 
speare's intellectual  action  is  wholly  unlike  that  of  Ben  Jonson 
or  Beaumont  and  Fletcher.  The  latter  see  the  totality  of  a 
sentence  or  passage,  and  then  project  it  entire.  Shakespeare 
goes  on  creating,  and  evolving  B  out  of  A,  and  C  out  of  B,  and 
so  on,  just  as  a  serpent  moves,  which  makes  a  fulcrum  of  its 
own  body,  and  seems  forever  twisting  and  untwisting  its  own 
strength.'  And  here  are  a  few  axioms:  'The  grandest  efforts 


136    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

of  poetry  are  where  the  imagination  is  called  forth,  not  to  pro- 
duce a  distinct  form,  but  a  strong  working  of  the  mind' ;  or,  in 
other  words,  !  The  power  of  poetry  is,  by  a  single  word  per- 
haps, to  instil  that  energy  into  the  mind  which  compels  the 
imagination  to  produce  the  picture.'  'Poetry  is  the  identity 
of  all  other  knowledges/  'the  blossom  and  fragrance  of  all 
human  knowledge,  human  thoughts,  human  passions,  emo- 
tions, language.'  'Verse  is  in  itself  a  music,  and  the  natural 
symbol  of  that  union  of  passion  with  thought  and  pleasure, 
which  constitutes  the  essence  of  all  poetry';  'a  more  than 
usual  state  of  emotion,  with  more  than  usual  order,'  as  he  has 
elsewhere  defined  it.  And,  in  one  of  his  spoken  counsels,  he 
says:  'I  wish  our  clever  young  poets  would  remember  my 
homely  definitions  of  prose  and  poetry ;  that  is,  prose  —  words 
in  their  best  order ;  poetry  —  the  best  words  in  the  best 
order.' 

Unlike  most  creative  critics,  or  most  critics  who  were  crea- 
tive artists  in  another  medium,  Coleridge,  when  he  was  writing 
criticism,  wrote  it  wholly  for  its  own  sake,  almost  as  if  it  were  a 
science.  His  prose  is  rarely  of  the  finest  quality  as  prose  writ- 
ing. Here  and  there  he  can  strike  out  a  phrase  at  red-heat,  as 
when  he  christens  Shakespeare  'the  one  Proteus  of  the  fire 
and  flood ' ;  or  he  can  elaborate  subtly,  as  when  he  notes  the 
judgement  of  Shakespeare,  observable  in  every  scene  of  the 
'Tempest,'  'still  preparing,  still  inviting,  and  still  gratifying, 
like  a  finished  piece  of  music ' ;  or  he  can  strike  us  with  the  wit 
of  the  pure  intellect,  as  when  he  condemns  certain  work  for 
being  'as  trivial  in  thought  and  yet  enigmatic  in  expression, 
as  if  Echo  and  the  Sphinx  had  laid  their  heads  together  to 
construct  it.'  But  for  the  most  part  it  is  a  kind  of  thinking 
aloud,  and  the  form  is  wholly  lost  in  the  pursuit  of  ideas.  With 
his  love  for  the  absolute,  why  is  it  that  he  does  not  seek  after 
an  absolute  in  words  considered  as  style,  as  well  as  in  words 
considered  as  the  expression  of  thought?  In  his  finest  verse 
Coleridge  has  the  finest  style  perhaps  in  English ;  but  his  prose 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  137 

is  never  quite  reduced  to  order  from  its  tumultuous  amplitude 
or  its  snake-like  involution.  Is  it  that  he  values  it  only  as  a 
medium,  not  as  an  art?  His  art  is  verse,  and  this  he  dreads, 
because  of  its  too  mortal  closeness  to  his  heart ;  the  prose  is  a 
means  to  an  end,  not  an  end  in  itself. 

The  poetry  of  Coleridge,  though  it  is  closely  interwoven  with 
the  circumstances  of  his  life,  is  rarely  made  directly  out  of 
those  circumstances.  To  some  extent  this  is  no  doubt  ex- 
plained by  a  fact  to  which  he  often  refers  in  his  letters,  and 
which,  in  his  own  opinion,  hindered  him  not  only  from  writing 
about  himself  in  verse,  but  from  writing  verse  at  all.  'As  to 
myself/ he  writes  in  1802, 'all  my  poetic  genius  .  .  .  is  gone,' 
and  he  attributes  it  'to  my  long  and  exceedingly  severe  meta- 
physical investigations,  and  these  partly  to  ill-health,  and 
partly  to  private  afflictions  which  rendered  any  subjects,  im- 
mediately connected  with  feeling,  a  source  of  pain  and  dis- 
quiet to  me.'  In  1818  he  writes : '  Poetry  is  out  of  the  question. 
The  attempt  would  only  hurry  me  into  that  sphere  of  acute 
feelings  from  which  abstruse  research,  the  mother  of  self- 
oblivion,  presents  an  asylum.'  But  theory  worked  with  a 
natural  tendency  in  keeping  him  for  the  most  part  away  from 
any  attempt  to  put  his  personal  emotions  into  verse.  '  A  sound 
promise  of  genius,'  he  considered,  'is  the  choice  of  subjects 
very  remote  from  the  private  interests  and  circumstances  of 
the  writer  himself.'  With  only  a  few  exceptions,  the  wholly 
personal  poems,  those  actually  written  under  a  shock  of  emo- 
tion, are  vague,  generalised,  turned  into  a  kind  of  literature. 
The  success  of  such  a  poem  as  the  almost  distressingly  per- 
sonal 'Ode  on  Dejection  '  comes  from  the  fact  that  Coleridge 
has  been  able  to  project  his  personal  feeling  into  an  outward 
image,  which  becomes  to  him  the  type  of  dejection;  he  can 
look  at  it  as  at  one  of  his  dreams  which  become  things ;  he  can 
sympathise  with  it  as  he  could  never  sympathise  with  his 
own  undeserving  self.  And  thus  one  stanza,  perhaps  the  finest 
as  poetry,  becomes  the  biography  of  his  soul :  — 


138    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'There  was  a  time  when,  though  my  path  was  rough, 

This  joy  within  me  dallied  with  distress, 
And  all  misfortunes  were  but  as  the  stuff 

Whence  Fancy  made  me  dream  of  happiness : 
For  hope  grew  round  me,  like  the  twining  vine, 
And  fruits,  and  foliage,  not  my  own,  seemed  mine. 
But  now  afflictions  bow  me  down  to  earth : 
Nor  care  I  though  they  rob  me  of  my  mirth; 

But  oh !  each  visitation 
Suspends  what  nature  gave  me  at  my  birth, 

My  shaping  spirit  of  Imagination. 
For  not  to  think  of  what  I  needs  must  feel, 

But  to  be  still  and  patient  all  I  can, 
And  haply  by  abstruse  research  to  steal 

From  my  own  nature  all  the  natural  man  — 

This  was  my  sole  resource,  my  only  plan: 
Till  that  which  suits  a  part  infects  the  whole, 
And  now  is  almost  grown  the  habit  of  my  soul.' 

Elsewhere,  in  personal  poems  like  'Frost  at  Midnight/  and 
'  Fears  in  Solitude,'  all  the  value  of  the  poem  comes  from  the 
delicate  sensations  of  natural  things  which  mean  so  much  more 
to  us,  whether  or  not  they  did  to  him,  than  the  strictly  personal 
part  of  the  matter.  You  feel  that  there  he  is  only  using  the 
quite  awake  part  of  himself,  which  is  not  the  essential  one.  He 
requires,  first  of  all,  to  be  disinterested,  or  at  least  not  over- 
come by  emotion ;  to  be  without  passion  but  that  of  abstract 
beauty,  in  nature,  or  in  idea;  and  then  to  sink  into  a  quite 
lucid  sleep,  in  which  his  genius  came  to  him  like  some  attend- 
ant spirit. 

In  the  life  and  art  of  Coleridge,  the  hours  of  sleep  seem  to 
have  been  almost  more  important  than  the  waking  hours.  '  My 
dreams  became  the  substance  of  my  life/  he  writes,  just  after  ^ 
the  composition  of  that  terrible  poem  on  'The  Pains  of  Sleep, \t> 
which  is  at  once  an  outcry  of  agony,  and  a  yet  more  disturbing 
vision  of  the  sufferer  with  his  fingers  on  his  own  pulse,  his  eyes 
fixed  on  his  own  hardly  awakened  eyes  in  the  mirror.  In  an 
earlier  letter,  written  at  a  time  when  he  is  trying  to  solve  the 
problem  of  the  five  senses,  he  notes:  'The  sleep  which  I  have 
is  made  up  of  ideas  so  connected,  and  so  little  different  from 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  139 

the  operations  of  reason,  that  it  does  not  afford  me  the  due 
refreshment.'  To  Coleridge,  with  the  help  of  opium,  hardly 
required,  indeed,  there  was  no  conscious  division  between  day 
and  night,  between  not  only  dreams  and  intuitions,  but  dreams 
and  pure  reason.  And  we  find  him,  in  almost  all  his  great 
poems,  frankly  taking  not  only  his  substance,  but  his  manner 
from  dreams,  as  he  dramatises  them  after  a  logic  and  a  passion 
of  their  own.  His  technique  is  the  transposition  into  his  waking 
hours  of  the  unconscious  technique  of  dreams.  It  is  a  kind  of 
verified  inspiration,  something  which  came  and  went,  and  was 
as  little  to  be  relied  upon  as  the  inspiration  itself.  On  one  side 
it  was  an  exact  science,  but  on  the  other  a  heavenly  visitation. 
Count  and  balance  syllables,  work  out  an  addition  of  the  feet 
in  the  verse  by  the  foot-rule,  and  you  will  seem  to  have  traced 
every  miracle  back  to  its  root  in  a  natural  product.  Only, 
something,  that  is,  everything,  will  have  escaped  you.  As  well 
dissect  a  corpse  to  find  out  the  principles  of  life.  That  elusive 
something,  that  spirit,  will  be  what  distinguishes  Coleridge's 
finest  verse  from  the  verse  of,  well,  perhaps  of  every  conscious 
artist  in  our  language.  For  it  is  not,  as  in  Blake,  literally  un- 
conscious, and  wavering  on  every  breath  of  that  unseen  wind 
on  which  it  floats  to  us ;  it  is  faultless ;  it  is  itself  the  wind  which 
directs  it,  it  steers  its  way  on  the  wind,  like  a  seagull  poised 
between  sky  and  sea,  and  turning  on  its  wings  as  upon  shifted 
sails. 

This  inspiration  comes  upon  Coleridge  suddenly,  without 
warning,  in  the  first  uncertain  sketch  of  'Lewti,'  written  at 
twenty-two:  and  then  it  leaves  him,  without  warning,  until 
the  great  year  1797,  three  years  later,  when  'Christabel'  and 
the  'Ancient  Mariner'  are  begun.  Before  and  after,  Coleridge 
is  seen  trying  to  write  like  Bowles,  like  Wordsworth,  like 
Southey,  perhaps,  to  attain  '  that  impetuosity  of  transition 
and  that  precipitancy  of  fancy  and  feeling,  which  are  the 
essential  qualities  of  the  sublimer  Ode,'  and  which  he  fondly 
fancies  that  he  has  attained  in  the  'Ode  on  the  Departing 


140    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Year/  with  its  one  good  line,  taken  out  of  his  note-book. 
But  here,  in  'Lewti/  he  has  his  style,  his  lucid  and  liquid 
melody,  his  imagery  of  moving  light  and  the  faintly  veiled 
transparency  of  air,  his  vague,  wildly  romantic  subject-matter, 
coming  from  no  one  knows  where,  meaning  one  hardly  knows 
what ;  but  already  a  magic,  an  incantation.  '  Lewti '  is  a  sort 
of  preliminary  study  for  'Kubla  Khan^;  it,  too,  has  all  the 
imagery  of  a  dream,  with  a  breathlessness  and  awed  hush,  as 
of  one  not  yet  accustomed  to  be  at  home  in  dreams. 

'  Kubla  Khan/  which  was  literally  composed  in  sleep,  comes 
nearer  than  any  other  existing  poem  to  that  ideal  of  lyric 
poetry  which  has  only  lately  been  systematised  by  theorists 
like  Mallarm§.  It  has  just  enough  meaning  to  give  it  bodily 
existence ;  otherwise  it  would  be  disembodied  music.  It  seems 
to  hover  in  the  air,  like  one  of  the  island  enchantments  of 
Prospero.  It  is  music  not  made  with  hands,  and  the  words 
seem,  as  they  literally  were,  remembered.  'All  the  images/ 
said  Coleridge,  'rose  up  before  me  as  things,  with  a  parallel 
production  of  the  correspondent  expressions.'  Lamb,  who  tells 
us  how  Coleridge  repeated  it '  so  enchantingly  that  it  irradiates 
and  brings  heaven  and  elysian  bowers  into  my  parlor  when  he 
says  or  sings  it  to  me/  doubted  whether  it  would  '  bear  day- 
light.' It  seemed  to  him  that  such  witchcraft  could  hardly 
outlast  the  night.  It  has  outlasted  the  century,  and  may  still 
be  used  as  a  touchstone;  it  will  determine  the  poetic  value 
of  any  lyric  poem  which  you  place  beside  it.  Take  as  many 
poems  as  you  please,  and  let  them  have  all  the  merits  you 
please,  their  ultimate  merit  as  poetry  will  lie  in  the  degree  of 
their  approach  to  the.  exaekjmconscious,  ineyi^able  balance 
oLqu^litie^in4Jie_pi)fitia art  of  ^Kubla  Khan.' 
'"In  the  'Ancient  Mariner/  which  it  seems  probable  was  com- 
posed before,  and  not  after  '  Kubla  Khan/  as  Coleridge's  date 
would  have  us  suppose,  a  new  supernaturalism  comes  into 
poetry,  which,  for  the  first  time,  accepted  the  whole  responsi- 
bility of  dreams.  The  impossible,  frankly  accepted,  with  its  own 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  141 

strict,  inverted  logic ;  the  creation  of  anew  atmosphere,  outside 
the  known  world,  which  becomes  as  real  as  the  air  about  us,  and 
\  yet  never  loses  its  strangeness;  the  shiver  that  comes  to  us, 
.  as  it  came  to  the  wedding-guest,  from  the  simple  good  faith 
of  the  teller;  here  is  a  whole  new  creation,  in  subject,  mood, 
and  technique.  Here,  as  in  '  Kubla  Khan,'  Coleridge  saw  the 
i  mages '  as  things ' ;  only  a  mind  so  overshadowed  by  dreams,  and 
so  easily  able  to  carry  on  his  sleep  awake,  could  have  done  so ; 
and,  with  such  a  mind,  'that  willing  suspension  of  disbelief 
for  a  moment,  which  constitutes  poetic  faith/  was  literally 
forced  upon  him.  'The  excellence  aimed  at/  says  Coleridge, 
'was  to  consist  in  the  interesting  of  the  affections  by  the  dra- 
matic truth  of  such  emotions,  as  would  naturally  accompany 
such  situations/  those  produced  by  supernatural  agency,  'sup- 
posing them  real.  And  real  in  this  sense  they  have  been  to 
every  human  being  who,  from  whatever  sense  of  delusion,  has 
at  any  time  believed  himself  under  supernatural  agency.' 
To  Coleridge,  whatever  appealed  vitally  to  his  imagination  was 
real;  and  he  defended  his  belief  philosophically,  disbelieving 
from  conviction  in  that  sharp  marking  off  of  real  from  imagi- 
nary which  is  part  of  the  ordinary  attitude  of  man  in  the  pre- 
sence of  mystery. 

It  must  not  be  forgotten  that  Coleridge  is  never  fantastic. 
The  fantastic  is  a  playing  with  the  imagination,  and  Coleridge 
respects  it.  His  intellect  goes  always  easily  as  far  as  his  im- 
agination will  carry  it,  and  does  not  stop  by  the  way  to  play 
tricks  upon  its  bearer.  Hence  the  conviction  which  he  brings 
with  him  when  he  tells  us  the  impossible.  And  then  his  style, 
in  its  ardent  and  luminous  simplicity,  flexible  to  every  bend 
of  the  spirit  which  it  clothes  with  flesh,  helps  him  in  the  idio- 
matic translation  of  dreams.  The  visions  of  Swedenborg 
are  literal  translations  of  the  imagination,  and  need  to  be  re- 
translated. Coleridge  is  equally  faithful  to  the  thing  seen  and 
to  the  laws  of  that  new  world  into  which  he  has  transposed  it. 
(  The  'Ancient  Mariner'  is  the  most  sustained  piece  of  im- 


142     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

agination  in  the  whole  of  English  poetry;  and  it  has  almost 
every  definable  merit  of  imaginative  narrative.  It  is  the  only 
poem  I  know  which  is  all  point  and  yet  all  poetry;  because,  I 
suppose,  the  point  is  really  a  point  of  mystery.  It  is  full  of 
simple,  daily  emotion,  transported,  by  an  awful  power  of  sight, 
to  which  the  limits  of  reality  are  no  barrier,  into  an  unknown 
sea  and  air ;  it  is  realised  throughout  the  whole  of  its  ghastly 
and  marvellous  happenings;  and  there  is  in  the  narrative  an 
ease,  a  buoyancy  almost,  which  I  can  only  compare  with  the 
music  of  Mozart,  extracting  its  sweetness  from  the  stuff  of 
tragedy;  it  presents  to  us  the  utmost  physical  and  spiritual 
horror,  not  only  without  disgust,  but  with  an  alluring  beauty?) 
Buf(3n  'Christabel/  in  the  first  part  especially,  we  find  a  qual- 
ity which  goes  almost  beyond  these  definable  merits.  There 
is  in  it  a  literal  spell,  not  acting  along  any  logical  lines,  not 
attacking  the  nerves,  not  terrifying,  not  intoxicating,  but  like 
a  slow,  enveloping  mist,  which  blots  out  the  real  world,  and 
leaves  us  unchilled  by  any  '  airs  from  heaven  or  blasts  from  hell,' 
but  in  the  native  air  of  some  middle  region.  In  these  two  or 
three  brief  hours  of  his  power  out  of  a  lifetime,  Coleridge  is 
literally  a  wizard^  People  have  wanted  to  know  what  '  Chris- 
tabel '  means,  and  how  it  was  to  have  ended,  and  whether 
Geraldine  was  a  vampire  (as  I  am  inclined  to  think)  or  had 
eyes  in  her  breasts  (as  Shelley  thought).  They  have  wondered 
that  a  poem  so  transparent  in  every  line  should  be,  as  a  whole, 
the  most  enigmatical  in  English.  But  does  it  matter  very 
much  whether  'Christabel'  means  this  or  that,  and  whether 
Coleridge  himself  knew,  as  he  said,  how  it  was  to  end,  or  whether, 
as  Wordsworth  declared,  he  had  never  decided?  It  seems  to 
me  that  Coleridge  was  fundamentally  right  when  he  said  of 
the  '  Ancient  Mariner/  '  It  ought  to  have  had  no  more  moral 
than  the  Arabian  Nights'  tale  of  the  merchant's  sitting  down 
to  eat  dates  by  the  side  of  a  well,  and  throwing  the  shells 
aside,  and  lo !  a  genie  starts  up,  and  says  he  must  kill  the  afore- 
said merchant,  because  one  of  the  date-shells  had,  it  seems, 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  143 

put  out  the  eye  of  the  genie's  son.'  The  'Ancient  Mariner/ 
if  we  take  its  moral  meaning  too  seriously,  comes  near  to  being 
an  allegory.  '  Christabel/  as  it  stands,  is  a  piece  of  pure  witch- 
craft, needing  no  further  explanation  than  the  fact  of  its  ex- 
istence. 

Rossetti  called  Coleridge  the  Turner  of  poets,  and  indeed 
there  is  in  Coleridge  an  aerial  glitter  which  we  find  in  no  other 
poet,  and  in  Turner  only  among  painters.  With  him  colour  is 
always  melted  in  atmosphere,  which  it  shines  through  like  fire 
within  a  crystal.  It  is  liquid  colour,  the  dew  on  flowers,  or  a 
mist  of  rain  in  bright  sunshine.  His  images  are  for  the  most 
part  derived  from  water,  sky,  the  changes  of  weather,  shadows 
of  things  rather  than  things  themselves,  and  usually  mental 
reflections  of  them.  'A  poet  ought  not  to  pick  Nature's 
pocket/  he  said,  and  it  is  for  colour  and  sound,  in  their  most 
delicate  forms,  that  he  goes  to  natural  things.    He  hears 

1  the  merry  nightingale 
That  crowds  and  hurries  and  precipitates 
With  fast  thick  warble  his  delicious  notes ' ; 

and  an  ecstasy  comes  to  him  out  of  that  natural  music  which 
is  almost  like  that  of  his  own  imagination.  -Only  music  or 
strange  effects  of  light  can  carry  him  swiftly  enough  out  of 
himself,  in  the  presence  of  visible  or  audible  things,  for  that 
really  poetic  ecstasy.  Then  all  his  languor  drops  off  from  him, 
like  a  clogging  garment. 

The  first  personal  ^rierii  which  appears  in  his  almost  wholly 
valueless  early  work  is  a  sense  of  colour.  In  a  poem  written 
at  twenty-one  he  sees  Fancy" 

'  Bathed  in  rich  amber-glowing  floods  of  light/ 

and  next  year  the  same  colour  reappears,  more  expressively,  in 
a  cloud, 

'wholly  bright, 
With  a  rich  and  amber  light.' 


144     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

The  two  women  in  'The  Two  Graves/  during  a  momentous 
pause,  are  found  discussing  whether  the  rays  of  the  sun  are 
green  or  amber ;  a  valley  is 

'Tinged  yellow  with  the  rich  departing  light'; 

seen  through  corn  at  evening, 

'  The  level  sunshine  glimmers  with  green  light ' ; 

and  there  is  the  carefully  observed 

'  western  sky 
And  its  peculiar  tint  of  yellow  green.' 

The  '  Ancient  Mariner '  is  f ull  jitimages  of  Jight  ajid  luminous 
colour  in  sky  and  sea ;  Glycine's  song  in  '  Zapolya '  is  the  most 
glittenng~poem  in  our  language,  with  a  soft  glitter  like  that 
of  light  seen  through  water.  And  Coleridge  is  continually  en- 
deavouring, as  later  poets  have  done  on  a  more  deliberate 
theory,  vto_£uf£«se  -sound  with  colour  or  make  colours  literally 
a  form  of  music;  as  in  an  early  poem 

'  Where  melodies  round  honey-dropping  flowers, 
Footless  and  wild,  like  birds  of  Paradise, 
Nor  pause,  nor  perch,  hovering  on  untamed  wing.' 

With  him,  as  with  some  of  them,  there  is  something  patholo- 
gical in  this  sensitiveness,  and  in  a  letter  written  in  1800  he 
says :  '  For  the  last  month  I  have  been  trembling  on  through 
sands  and  swamps  of  evil  and  bodily  grievance.  My  eyes 
have  been  inflamed  to  a  degree  that  rendered  reading  scarcely 
possible ;  and,  strange  as  it  seems,  the  act  of  mere  composition, 
as  I  lay  in  bed,  perceptibly  affected  them,  and  my  voluntary 
ideas  were  every  minute  passing,  more  or  less  transformed 
into  vivid  spectra.' 

Side  by  side  with  this  sensrtiv©nes^_to  colour,  or  interfused 
with  it,  we  find  a  similar,  or  perhaps  a  greater,  sensitiveness 
to_s6Und.  Coleridge  shows  a  greater  sensitiyeniss  to  music 
than  any  English  poet  except  Milton.  The  sonneT^o  Linley 
records  his  ecstatic  responsiveness  to  music;  Purcell's  music, 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  145 

too,  which  he  names  with  Palestrina's  ('some  madrigals  which 
he  heard  at  Rome ')  in  the  'Table-Talk.'  'I  have  the  intensest 
delight  in  music/  he  says  there,  'and  can  detect  good  from 
bad ' ;  a  rare  thing  among  poets.  In  one  of  his  letters  he  notes : 
'I  hear  in  my  brain  .  .  .  sensations  ...  of  various  degrees 
of  pain,  even  to  a  strange  sort  of  uneasy  pleasure.  ...  I  hear 
in  my  brain,  and  still  more  in  my  stomach.'  There  we  get  the 
morbid  physical  basis  of  a  sensitiveness  to  music  which  came 
to  mean  much  to  him.  In  a  note  referring  to  'Christabel,' 
and  to  the  reasons  why  it  had  never  been  finished,  he  says : 
'  I  could  write  as  good  verse  now  as  ever  I  did,  if  I  were  per- 
fectly free  from  vexations,  and  were  in  the  ad  libitum  hearing 
of  fine  music,  which  has  a  sensible  effect  in  harmonizing  my 
thoughts,  and  in  animating  and,  as  it  were,  lubricating  my 
inventive  faculty.'  '.Christabelj^mox&JJian  anything  of  Cole- 
ridge, is  composed  like  music ;  you  might  set  at  the  side  of  each 
section,  especially  of  the  opening,  largo,  vivacissimo,  and,  as 
the  general  expression  signature,  tempo  rubato.  I  know  no 
other  verse  in  which  the  effects  of  music  are  so  precisely  copied 
in  metre.  Shelley,  you  feel,  sings  like  a  bird ;  Blake,  like  a  child 
or  an  angel ;  but  Coleridge  oertainly  writes  music. 

The  metre  of  the '  Ancient  Mariner '  is  a  re-reading  of  the 
familiar  ballad-metre,  in  which  nothing  of  the  original  force, 
swiftness  or  directness  is  lost,  while  a  new  subtlety,  a  wholly^ 
new  music,  has  come  into  it.  The  metre  of '  Christabel '  is  even 
more  of  an  invention,  and  it  had  more  immediate  conse- 
quences. The  poem  was  begun  in  1797,  and  not  published 
till  1816;  but  in  1801  Scott  heard  it  recited,  and  in  1805,  re- 
produced what  he  could  of  it  in  'The  Lay  of  the  Last 
Minstrel'  and  the  other  metrical  romances  which,  in  their 
turn,  led  the  way  to  Byron,  who  himself  heard  '  Christabel ' 
recited  in  1811.  But  the  secjet  of  Coleridge's  instinct  of  mel- 
ody afid_sjcience  of  harmony  was  not  discovered.  Such  ecstasy 
and  such  collectedness,  a  way  of  writing  which  seems  to  aim 
at  nothing  but  the  most  precisely  expregsiva  simplicity,  and 


146    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

yet§eis-the-  whole  brain  dancing  to  its  tune,  can  hardly  be 
indicated  more  exactly  than  in  Coleridge's  own  words  in 
reference  to  the  Italian  lyrists  of  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth 
centuries.  They  attained  their  aim,  he  says,  'by  the  avoid- 
ance of  every  word  which  a  gentleman  would  not  use  in  digni- 
fied conversation,  and  of  every  word  and  phrase  which  none 
but  a  learned  man  would  use ;  by  the  studied  position  of  words 
and  phrases,  so  that  not  only  each  part  should  be  melodious 
in  itself,  but  contribute  to  the  harmony  of  the  whole,  each 
note  referring  and  conducing  to  the  melody  of  all  the  fore- 
going and  following  words  of  the  same  period  or  stanza ;  and, 
lastly,  with  equal  labour,  the  greater  because  unbetrayed,  by 
the  variation  and  various  harmonies  of  their  metrical  move- 
ment.' These  qualities  we  may  indeed  find  in  many  of  Cole- 
ridge's songs,  part  Elizabethan,  part  eighteenth  century,  in 
some  of  his  infantile  jingles,  his  exuberant  comic  verse  (in 
which,  however,  there  are  many  words  'which  a  gentleman 
would  not  use ')  and  in  a  poem  like  'Love,' which  has  suffered 
as  much  indiscriminate  praise  as  Raphael's  Madonnas,  which 
it  resembles  in  technique  and  sentiment,  and  in  its  exquisite 
perfection  of  commonplace,  its  tqurjlejorce  of  an  almost  flaw- 
,  "jless  girlishness.  But  in  'Christabel '  the  technique  has  an  in- 
comparable substance  to  work  upon ;  substance  at  once  simple 
and  abnormal,  which  Coleridge  required,  in  order  to  b8  at  his 
best. 

It  has  been  pointed  out  by  the  profoundest  poetical 
critic  of  our  time  that  the  perfection  of  Coleridge's  style  in 
poetry  comes  from  an  equal  balance  of  the  clear,  somewhat 
matter-of-fact. qualities  of  the  eighteenth  cenlQry  with  the 
remote,  imaginative  qualities  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
'To  please  me,'  said  Coleridge  in  'Table-Talk,'  '  a  poem  must 
be  either  music  or  sense.'  The  eighteenth-century  manner, 
with  its  sense  only  just  coupled  with  a  kind  of  tame  and  wing- 
less music,  may  be  seen  quite  by  itself  in  the  early  song  from 
'  Robespierre ! :  — 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE  147 

'Tell  me,  on  what  holy  ground 
May  domestic  peace  be  found.' 

Here  there  is  both  matter  and  manner,  of  a  kind;  in  'The 
Kiss '  of  the  same  year,  with  its  one  exquisite  line,  — 

'The  gentle  violence  of  joy,' 

there  is  only  the  liquid  glitter  of  manner.  We  get  the  ultimate 
union  of  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  century  qualities  in  '  Work 
without  Hope/  and  in  'Youth  and  Age/  which  took  nine  years 
to  bring  into  its  faultless  ultimate  form.  There  is  always  a 
tendency  in  Coleridge  to  fall  back  on  the  eighteenth-century 
manner,  with  its  scrupulous  exterior  neatness,  and  its  com- 
fortable sense  of  something  definite  said  definitely  whenever 
the  double  inspiration  flags,  and  matter  and  manner  do  not 
come  together.  'I  cannot  write  without  a  body  of  thought,' 
he  said,  at  a  time  before  he  had  found  himself  or  his  style ; 
and  he  added:  'Hence  my  poetry  is  crowded  and  sweats 
beneath  a  heavy  burden  of  ideas  and  imagery !  It  has  seldom 
ease.'  It  was  an  unparalleled  ease  in  the  conveying  of  a '  body 
of  thought '  that  he  was  finally  to  attain.  In  '  Youth  and  Age/, 
think  how  much  is  actually  said,  and  with  a  brevity  impossible 
in  prose ;  things,  too,  far  from  easy  for  poetry  to  say  grace- 
fully, such  as  the  image  of  the  steamer,  or  the  frank  reference 
to  '  this  altered  size ' ;  and  then  see  with  what  an  art,  as  of 
the  very  breathing  of  syllables,  it  passes  into  the  most  flowing 
of  lyric  forms.  Besides  these  few  miracles  of  his  later  years, 
there  are  many  poems,  such  as  the  Flaxman  group  of  'Love, 
Hope,  and  Patience  supporting  Education/  in  which  we  get 
all  that  can  be  poetic  in  the  epigram  softened  by  imagination, 
all  that  can  be  given  by  an  ecstatic  plain  thinking.  The  rarest 
magic  has  gone,  and  he  knows  it;  philosophy  remains,  and 
out  of  that  resisting  material  he  is  able,  now  and  again,  to 
weave,  in  his  deftest  manner,  a  few  garlands. 


148     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 
f       ROBERT  SOUTHEY  (1774-1843) ' 


Lander,  whose  praise,  but  for  Byron's  immortalising  on- 
slaught, would  be  Southey's  chief  claim  to  remembrance,  said 
in  all  good  faith:  'Interest  is  always  excited  by  him,  enthusi- 
asm not  always.  If  his  elegant  prose  and  harmonious  verse  are 
insufficient  to  excite  it,  turn  to  his  virtues.'  While  Southey 
was  living,  his  virtues  benefited  many;  with  his  death  they 
ceased  to  concern  the  world;  only  his  legacy  remained.  It 
is  that  legacy,  of  verse  and  prose,  which  we  have  to  consider 
in  any  attempt  to  estimate  his  position  in  English  literature ; 
and  it  is  only  to  confuse  two  distinct  worlds  of  activity,  to 
put  forward,  as  so  many  of  his  admirers  and  apologists  have 
done',.' his  virtues,'  'the  beauty  of  his  life,'  or  even  'the  magni- 
tude^ and  variety  of  his  powers,  the  field  which  he  covered  in 
literature,'  as  in  any  sense  a  compensation  for  his  lack  of  the 
virtues  and  beauty  of  great  poetry,  the  magnitude  and  variety 
of  great  prose. 

Byron  said  of  Southey  that  he  was  '  the  only  existing  entire 
man  of  letters ' ;  and  in  the  preface  to  the  first  volume  of  his 
collected  poems  Southey  names,  as  '  what  has  been  the  great- 
est of  all  advantages,  that  I  have  passed  more  than  half  my 
life  in  retirement,  conversing  with  books  rather  than  men,  con- 

1  (1)  Fall  of  Robespierre  (with  Coleridge  and  Lovell),  1794.  (2)  Poems 
(by  Robert  Lovell  and  Robert  Southey),  1795.  (3)  Poems  by  Bion  and 
Moschus,  1795.  (4)  Joan  of  Arc,  1796.  (5)  Minor  Poems,  2  vols.,  1797. 
(6)  Thalaba  the  Destroyer,  2  vols.,  1801.  (7)  Metrical  Tales,  1805.  (8) 
Madoc,  1805.  (9)  The  Curse  of  Kehama,  1810.  (10)  Roderick,  the  Last 
of  the  Goths,  1814.  (11)  Carmen  Triumphale,  1814.  (12)  Carmen  Aulica, 
1814.  (13)  Odes  to  the  Regent,  1814.  (14)  The  Lay  of  the  Laureate :  Carmen 
Nuptiale,  1816.  (15)  The  Poet's  Pilgrimage  to  Waterloo,  1816.  (16)  Wat 
Tyler,  1817.  (17)  Princess  Charlotte's  Epithalamion,  1817.  (18)  A  Vision 
of  Judgement,  1821.  (19)  A  Tale  of  Paraguay,  1825.  (20)  All  for  Love, 
and  The  Pilgrim  to  Compostella,  1829.  (21)  Oliver  Newman  (posthumous), 
1 845.      (22)  Robin  Hood,  1847. 


ROBERT  SOUTHEY  149 

stantly  and  unweariedly  engaged  in  literary  pursuits.'  There, 
in  what  made  him  so  capable  a  man  of  letters,  was  what  made 
him  no  poet; ' books  made  out  of  books  pass  away.'  He  gives 
us  a  conscientious  list  of  '  the  obligations  which  I  am  conscious 
of  owing  either  to  my  predecessors,  or  my  contemporaries ' ; 
and  assures  us  that '  the  taste  which  has  been  acquired  in  that 
school '  (some  of  his  masters  were  among  the  best)  '  was  not 
likely  to  be  corrupted  afterwards.'  It  matters  little  how  far 
that  taste  was  or  was  not  corrupted ;  what  mattered  was,  that 
there  was  no  native  genius  for  the  best  taste  in  the  world  to 
set  in  motion ;  and  that  such  impulse  as  there  was,  the  genu- 
ine will  to  write,  was  never  wholly  unencumbered  by  second 
thoughts,  or  by  recollections  of  what  had  been  written  and 
printed  by  poets.  Southey  had  no  new  vision  of  the  world; 
he  came  with  no  new  music. 

To  himself,  it  is  true,  he  seemed  to  have  made  a  new  heaven 
and  a  new  earth,  and  to  have  perfected  a  rare  and  unfamiliar 
music.  He  went  to  the  East,  or  to  Spain,  or  to  heaven  itself, 
for  the  scene  of  his  '  works  of  greater  extent ' ;  he  followed  Dr. 
Sayers  in  the  use  of  unrhymed  metres,  and  produced  English 
hexameters  of  his  own.  He  is  forever  insisting  that  he  will 
'sing  as  he  pleases,'  imagining  that  a  new  metre  means  a  new 
music,  and  that  the  desire  to  be  novel  brings  with  it  the  power 
to  be  new.  It  seems  to  him  a  self-evident  corollary  that  by 
'  following  his  own  sense  of  propriety '  he  was  '  thereby  obtain- 
ing the  approbation  of  that  fit  audience,  which,  being  con- 
tented that  it  should  be  few,  I  was  sure  to  find.'  And  it  is  with 
complete  confidence  that,  thirty  years  after  '  Kehama '  had 
been  published,  he  reminds  us  that,  at  the  time  of  writing,  'it 
appeared  to  me,  that  here  neither  the  tone  of  morals,  nor  the 
strain  of  poetry,  could  be  pitched  too  high ;  that  nothing  but 
moral  sublimity  could  compensate  for  the  extravagance  of 
the  fictions.'  That  moral  sublimity,  he  never  doubted  that 
it  was  within  his  grasp ;  that  strain  of  poetry,  he  never  doubted 
that  he  could  pitch  it  as  high  as  he  had  the  mind  to.    Un- 


150     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

troubled  by  a  suspicion  that  he  might  not  be  a  poet,  he  was 
conscious  that  he  could  write  in  verse  very  much  as  he  wanted 
to  write.  All  his  knowledge  of  literature,  which  was  not  even 
sufficient  to  make  him  a  fine  critic,  availed  him  nothing  when 
he  came  to  look  at  his  own  work  in  verse.  The  criticism,  severe 
but  just,  of  Jeffrey  and  the  others,  seemed  to  him  'malice  ' 
which  he  need  only  disregard.  'The  reader  will  be  as  much 
amused  as  I  was/  he  says,  in  quoting  that  admirable  letter 
of  Jeffrey  to  Hogg : '  For  Southey,  I  have,  as  well  as  you,  great 
respect,  and,  when  he  will  let  me,  great  admiration ;  but  he 
is  a  most  provoking  fellow,  and  at  least  as  conceited  as  his 
neighbour  Wordsworth.'  He  quotes  many  unfavourable 
criticisms  in  his  prefaces,  always  with  lofty  scorn;  but  time 
has  sided  with  the  critics. 

Southey  loved  books  with  the  chief  passion  of  his  life ;  and 
Rogers,  who  notes  acutely  that  '  he  was  what  you  call  a  cold 
man,'  declares  that  he  was  never  happy  '  except  when  reading 
a  book  or  making  one.'  He  lived  always  in  the  midst  of  books, 
considered  that  'it  is  to  literature,  humanly  speaking,  that  I 
am  beholden,  not  only  for  the  means  of  subsistence,  but  for 
every  blessing  which  I  enjoy  ' ;  and,  as  the  mind  died  out  of 
him  in  his  last  years,  still  loved  to  handle  and  caress  the  books 
which  he  could  no  longer  read.  He  was  probably  what  is  called 
the  '  best  read  '  of  English  writers ;  he  had  taste  and  memory ; 
and  in  all  he  has  written  about  books  there  is  prodigious  know- 
ledge and  for  the  most  part  ready,  or  as  he  would  have  called 
it,  catholic  sympathy.  But  he  said,  really  meaning  the  lament- 
able thing  which  he  said :  '  Your  true  lover  of  books  is  never 
fastidious.'  He  read  everything,  and  he  read  with  an  enthu- 
siasm which  was  never  sharpened  into  divination ;  when  he 
took  the  right  view,  as  he  more  often  did  than  not,  he  never 
said  the  essential  thing;  of  what  has  been  called  the  vraie 
verite  of  things  he  had  no  conception :  never  does  he  come 
upon  it  even  by  accident. 

So,  though  he  quotes  the  '  Mad  Song '  of  Blake  with  admira- 


ROBERT  SOUTHEY  151 

tion,  he  calls  it  'painful/  and  Blake  an  'insane  and  erratic 
genius ' ;  and  though  he  praises  Drayton,  can  say  nothing  more 
to  the  point,  when  he  has  finished  a  judicious  commendation 
of  the  'Polyolbion/  than  that  'some  of  his  minor  poems  have 
merit  enough  in  their  execution  to  ensure  their  preservation.' 
One  discovery  he  made,  the  discovery  of  Landor,  whom  he 
praised  gallantly,  and  by  whom  he  was  rewarded  beyond  his 
deserts.  He  was  the  friend  of  Wordsworth,  and  at  one  time 
the  friend  of  Coleridge;  Coleridge  he  once  praised,  though 
without  discernment,  and  Wordsworth  to  his  full  deserts,  or 
beyond  them.  But  of  Coleridge,  at  his  death,  he  said:  'He 
has  long  been  dead  to  me/  and,  if  Moore  is  to  be  believed, 
he  said  that  Coleridge  died  '  lamented  by  few,  and  regretted 
by  none.'  'He  builds  up  kingdoms  and  pulls  them  down/ 
he  had  said,  in  1810,  'just  as  children  serve  their  card 
houses;  aiming  at  nothing  permanent,  and  incapable  of  pro- 
ducing anything  that  can  be  so.'  '  His  habits  have  continued, 
and  so  have  mine/  he  says  in  another  letter,  not  realising  the 
irony  of  what  he  says;  and  then,  for  twenty  years,  there  is 
silence,  and  not  even  a  relenting  towards  the  dead.  Byron  was 
never  on  civil  terms  with  him,  and  he  allowed  morals  and  poli- 
tics to  turn  him  into  a  traducer  of  Byron;  he  seemed  never 
to  have  suspected  the  genius  of  Shelley  and  of  Keats ;  he  could 
go  out  of  his  way  to  call  Leigh  Hunt  'wrong-headed,  foolish, 
impudently  conceited ' ;  he  was  the  friend  of  Lamb,  but  he  did 
nothing  for  him  until  he  was  already  famous,  and  beyond  need 
of  his  help.  He  edited,  it  is  true,  the  first  collected  edition  of 
the  works  of  Chatterton;  but  he  edited  also  the  worthless 
remains  of  Henry  Kirke  White,  announcing  him  as  'one  whose 
early  death  is  not  less  to  be  lamented  as  a  loss  to  English 
literature.'  'And  whose  virtues  were  as  admirable  as  his 
genius/  he  adds ;  and  there,  in  that  fixed  idea,  that  persistent 
confusion  of  virtue  with  genius,  we  may  distinguish  part,  the 
deliberate  part,  of  the  reason  why  he  was  not  more  certain, 
why  he  could  not  be  more  disinterested,  as  a  critic. 


152     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

What  renders  Southey  so  irritating  as  a  man,  for  all  his 
virtues,  is  his  conscious  rectitude.  Virtue  may  or  may  not 
be  its  own  reward  to  most  people,  but  it  certainly  was  to 
Southey,  and  he  is  at  no  pains  to  disguise  the  fact,  or  the 
virtue.  His  biographer  sees  '  the  wisdom  of  the  heart '  in  a 
letter  written  to  his  wife  in  absence,  in  which  he  says : '  Though 
not  unhappy  (my  mind  is  too  active  and  too  well  disciplined 
to  yield  to  any  such  criminal  weakness)  still  without  you 
I  am  not  happy.'  Can  moderation  show  itself  in  a  more  con- 
temptible light?  It  is  the  same  spirit  of  conscious  rectitude 
that  shows  itself  in  the  second '  Letter  concerning  Lord  Byron ' 
of  1824,  where,  speaking  of  Shelley,  he  says : '  When  I  had 
ceased  to  regard  him  with  hope,  he  became  to  me  an  object 
for  sorrow  and  awful  commiseration.'  What  man  has  the 
right  to  speak  in  that  tone  of  another  man,  whose  opinions 
do  not  happen  to  be  identical  with  his?  And  of  a  man  of 
genius?  But  Southey  had  no  reverence  for  the  individuality 
of  genius ;  he  could  recognise  the  divine  only  when  it  came  to 
him  in  the  full  regimentals  of  his  own  creed;  he  demanded 
a  universal  moral  conformity,  a  universal  uniformity  of  be- 
lief. It  is  not  that  he  is  Christian :  he  is  parochial. 

And  so  I  find  in  Southey,  high-minded,  generous,  and  help- 
ful as  he  could  be,  a  disloyalty  more  serious  than  any  personal 
disloyalty,  such  as  Coleridge's,  a  disloyalty  to  genius ;  an  im- 
morality more  hurtful  than  Byron's,  the  immorality  of  the 
intellect,  which  shuts  its  eyes  to  truth  when  truth  comes  to 
it  under  some  disguise  of  evil;  together  with  a  vindictive 
moral  sense  which  not  only  perverted  his  judgement,  but  soured 
his  whole  nature.  He  could  refer  to  Byron  as  'one,  whose 
baseness  is  such  as  to  sanctify  the  vindictive  feeling  that 
it  provokes,  and  upon  whom  the  act  of  taking  vengeance, 
is  that  of  administering  justice.'  Byron's  'Don  Juan'  he 
thought  a  'flagitious  production,  by  which  he  will  be  remem- 
bered for  lasting  infamy.'  It  seemed  to  him  '  a  work  in  which 
mockery  was  mingled  with  horrors,  filth  with  impiety,  profli- 


ROBERT  SOUTHEY  153 

gacy  with  sedition  and  slander.'  And  he  affirmed:  'I  have 
fastened  his  name  upon  the  gibbet,  for  reproach  and  ignominy, 
as  long  as  it  shall  endure.  Take  it  down  who  can ! ' 

Well,  the  name  of  Byron  has  long  since  been  taken  down 
from  that  forgotten  gibbet,  and  all  that  anybody  now  re- 
members is  that  Byron,  justly  or  unjustly,  pilloried  Southey 
into  fame,  in  a  'Vision  of  Judgment'  named  after  its  victim's. 
Where  the  moral  right  or  wrong  was,  no  one  cares:  a  great 
work  of  satiric  genius  has  crushed  out  a  little  and  mediocre 
work  of  careful  talent.  'Don  Juan,'  a  great  imperfect  work, 
in  which  there  is  much  that  is  gross,  and  trivial,  and  unworthy, 
has  come  to  be  recognised  as  Byron's  masterpiece,  the  master- 
piece of  a  great  and  imperfect  writer.  What  to  Southey  seemed 
all-important,  seems  to  us  now  not  worth  lingering  over. 
Only  what  was  great  in  it  has  survived. 

In  his  'Table-Talk'  Coleridge  is  reported  to  have  spoken 
of  Southey 's  English  prose  as  'next  door  to  faultless.'  It  is 
that,  and  it  has  most  negative  merits;  but  it  is,  like  his  verse, 
uninspired,  without  any  great  or  exquisite  qualities;  without 
magic.  It  has  ease  and  flexibility;  it  is,  as  he  said  of  it,  con- 
trasting it  scornfully  with  Coleridge's,  'perspicuous  and  to 
the  point.'  As  a  style  of  all  work  it  is  incomparable;  as 
Southey  is  the  ideal  of  the  'well-read '  man,  so  his  style  is  the 
ideal  of  the  '  readable '  style.  His  '  Life  of  Wesley '  is  remark- 
able as  a  psychological  study,  and  that,  like  the  'Life  of 
Nelson,'  is  a  marvel  of  clear,  interesting,  absorbing  narrative. 
We  remember  it,  not  for  any  page  or  passage,  but  as  a  whole, 
for  its  evenness,  proportion,  and  easy  mastery  of  its  subject. 
But  in  that  unique  subject,  which  gave  him  the  opportunity 
of  his  life,  a  subject  absolutely  'made  to  his  hand,'  can  it  be 
said  that  Southey  found,  any  more  than  in  his  criticism  of 
literature,  the  vraie  verite,  the  essential  thing?  The  portrait 
of  Wesley  he  gives  us,  but  does  he  give  us  anywhere  the  secret 
of  Wesley? 

In  one  of  his  books,  'The  Doctor,'  which  was  published 


154     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

anonymously,  volume  by  volume,  Southey  has  tried  for  once 
to  give  us  what  he  could  of  the  secret  of  himself.  It  is  his  most 
personal  work  in  prose;  and  it  is  personal  partly  for  this 
reason,  that  it  is  a  compilation,  a  collection  of  curiosities,  a 
farrago,  yet  thrown  together,  one  realises,  by  a  man  of  order, 
who  lets  nothing  escape  him  unawares,  tells  just  what  he 
chooses  to  tell.  Poe,  who  thought  Southey  could  not  have 
written  it,  imagined  that  it  had  been  written  'with  a  sole 
view  (or  nearly  with  the  sole  view)  of  exciting  inquiry  and 
comment.'  'I  see  in  "The  Doctor,"'  wrote  Southey,  who,  in 
the  course  of  his  book,  refers,  rather  more  often  than  is  neces- 
sary for  purposes  of  disguise,  to  Southey, '  Southey  and  Words- 
worth' (never  'Wordsworth  and  Southey'),  'a  little  of  Rabe- 
lais, but  not  much;  more  of  Tristram  Shandy,  somewhat  of 
Burton,  and  perhaps  more  of  Montaigne;  but  methinks  the 
quintum  quid  predominates.'  The  influences  are  there,  it  is 
true,  and  the  personal  quality;  but  can  the  book,  with  all  its 
quaintness,  pleasantness  and  variety,  bear  the  least  of  these 
comparisons,  or  stand  by  itself  with  any  firmness?  Perhaps  the 
best  thing  in  it  is  the  nursery  story  of  'The  Three  Bears,' 
and  that  is  one  of  Southey's  real  successes,  one  of  his  suc- 
cesses in  comedy ;  but  how  few  of  the  other  more  serious  pages 
leave  so  deep  an  impression  on  the  memory  as  this  piece  of 
engaging  nonsense? 


As  a  writer  of  verse  Southey  had  a  small  but  genuine  talent 
of  a  homely  and  grotesque  order ;  and  if  he  had  had  less  am- 
bition, and  a  keener  sense  of  his  own  limitations,  he  might 
have  appealed  with  more  likelihood  of  final  satisfaction  to 
'that  Court  of  Record'  which,  sooner  or  later,  as  he  says,  with 
his  imperturbable  self-confidence,  'pronounces  unerringly 
upon  the  merits  of  the  case.'  But  he  was  revolutionary,  where 
no  revolt  was  needed;  original,  at  his  own  expense;  an  in- 
ventor of  systems,  not  a  discoverer  of  riches.  And  first  in  re- 


ROBERT  SOUTHEY  155 

gard  to  metre.  Southey  wrote  one  or  two  clever  pieces,  such 
as  '  The  Cataract  of  Lodore/  to  show  how  easily  and  effectively 
he  could  rhyme,  but  it  was  one  of  his  theories  that  better  verse 
could  be  written  in  English  without  rhyme  than  with  it.  A 
certain  Dr.  Sayers  ('the  German  critics  observed  a  resem- 
blance between  Sayers  and  Gray')  had  published  in  1790 
some  '  Dramatic  Sketches  of  Northern  Mythology ' ;  and,  much 
later,  writing  about  him  in  the  'Quarterly/  Southey  tells  us 
that  'Sayers  was  not  of  the  school  of  Shakespeare/  whereas 
'  the  simplest  of  the  Greek  dramas  are  not  so  simple  in  their 
construction  as  these  dramatic  sketches.'  They  were  written 
in  blank  verse  mingled  with  choruses  in  unrhymed  lyrical 
verse.  'Unrhymed  lyrical  measures/  Southey  tells  us,  'had 
been  tried  by  Milton  with  unhappy  success;  and  his  failure 
would  have  deterred  any  ordinary  mind  from  repeating  the 
experiment;  but  in  reality  that  failure  proved  only  that  the 
experiment  had  been  ill  made.  There  are  parts  in  the  choruses 
of  the  "  Samson  Agonistes  "  wherein  it  is  difficult  to  discover 
any  principle  of  rhythm.'  Where  Milton,  however,  had  failed, 
'  Dr.  Sayers  committed  no  such  error.'  And  Southey  reminds 
his  readers  that  Dr.  Sayers  had  been  followed  to  good  pur- 
pose. 'If  blank  verse/  he  says,  'be  much  more  difficult  than 
couplets  or  stanzas,  that  measure  is  itself  not  so  difficult 
as  the  verse  of  Sayers'  choruses.  The  poet  who  rejects  the 
aid  of  uniformity  takes  upon  himself  a  task  of  more  arduous 
execution.  Sayers  has  been  followed  by  Mr.  Southey  in  the 
metre  of  "  Thalaba  "  and  of  many  minor  poems :  he  would  have 
found  more  followers  if  the  model  had  been  as  easy  as  it  may 
appear  to  those  who  have  had  no  experience  in  composition.' 
In  1792  Dr.  Sayers  published  a  short  poem  which  he  called 
'Oswald,  a  Monodrama/  and  in  his  preface  he  tells  us:  'The 
Monodrama  is  a  species  of  Play,  which  has  not  yet,  as  far  as 
I  am  able  to  discover,  been  attempted  by  English  writers.' 
In  a  year's  time  there  is  another  monodrama  in  English;  it 
is  Southey's ;  and  who  knows  if  we  may  not  trace  to  Dr.  Say- 


156     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

era,  through  Southey,  the  beginnings  in  modern  English  of  a 
form  which  Landor  made  Greek  and  Browning  made  alive 
and  his  own?  If  so,  it  would  not  be  the  only  instance  in  which 
Southey  found  out  new  ways  for  better  walkers.  In  the 
'  English  Eclogues '  of  1799,  with  their  deliberate  realism  of 
tone  and  detail,  their  careful  English  local  colour,  I  cannot 
but  see  the  origin  of  those  '  English  Idylls '  of  Tennyson,  which 
travel  along  a  hardly  higher  road,  for  the  most  part,  but  of 
which  it  could  not  be  said,  as  Lamb  justly  said  of  Southey's, 
that  they  are  '  as  poetical  as  the  subject  requires,  which  asks 
no  poetry.' 

Dr.  Sayers'  unrhymed  measures  attempt  less  than  Southey 
attempted,  and  are  even  further  from  being  good  verse.  But 
we  see  them,  carefully  tended  by  Taylor  of  Norwich,  in  an 
elegant  volume  of  remains,  suggesting  a  ghastly  heredity 
for  later  vers  libristes,  classical  or  impressionistic.  It  is  almost 
in  the  words  of  Mr.  Bridges  that  Southey  explains  to  us  how 
Dr.  Sayers  'constructed  his  verses  so  that  they  required  no 
humouring  from  an  indulgent  reader,  but  that  in  the  easy  and 
natural  pronunciation  of  the  words,  the  accent  should  neces- 
sarily fall  where  the  harmony  of  the  line  required  it.'  There, 
certainly,  we  have  the  principle  of  all  good  verse  not  writ- 
ten to  a  known  tune;  but  the  tune,  'the  harmony  of  the 
tune,'  if  that  should  be  absent,  of  what  avail  are  all  the 
theories? 

If  we  wish  to  find  an  infallible  test  of  Southey's  ear  for 
rhythm,  we  shall  find  it  in  the  'short  passages  of  Scripture 
rhythmically  arranged  or  paraphrased'  which  are  printed 
among  his  'poetical  remains.'  One  example  will  suffice.  Here 
is  the  text  as  we  find  it  in  Jeremiah : '  Give  glory  unto  the  Lord 
your  God,  before  he  cause  darkness,  and  before  your  feet 
stumble  upon  the  dark  mountains,  and,  while  ye  look  for  light, 
he  turn  it  into  the  shadow  of  death,  and  make  it  gross  dark- 
ness.' And  this  is  what  seemed  to  Southey  a  finer  rhythmical 
arrangement :  — 


ROBERT  SOUTHEY  157 

'  Give  glory  to  the  Lord  your  God ! 
Lest,  while  ye  look  for  light, 
He  bring  the  darkness  on, 
And  the  feet  that  advanced 
With  haughty  step, 
Marching  astray  in  their  pride, 
Stumble  and  fail 
In  the  shadow  of  death.' 

Just  as  we  see  him  deliberately,  and  with  complete  uncon- 
sciousness of  what  he  is  doing,  turning  a  solemn  and  measured 
prose  into  unevenly  jigging  verse,  so,  in  his  vast  metrical  ro- 
mances, 'Thalaba'  and  'Kehama,'  we  find  him  turning  his 
own  clear  and  graceful  prose  into  verse  as  inexplicably  ca- 
denced  as  this :  — 

'  Reclined  against  a  column's  broken  shaft, 
Unknowing  whitherward  to  bend  his  way, 
He  stood,  and  gazed  around 

The  Ruins  closed  him  in;    f' 

It  seem'd  as  if  no  foot  of  man 

For  ages  had  intruded  there.' 

It  is  hardly  possible  for  a  thing  to  be  said  with  more  complete 
dissonance  between  sound  and  sense,  meaning  and  measure, 
than  the  thing  which  is  said  in  these  lines. 

Then,  Southey  was  not  only  an  innovator  in  regard  to 
metre,  but  in  regard  to  the  subject-matter  of  poetry.  His 
great  ambition  was  to  write  epics,  and  he  wrote  five  or  six 
immense  narratives,  of  which  the  two  most  characteristic 
were  founded  on  Arabian  and  Indian  mythology.  Southey 
once  brought  down  on  himself  the  wrath  of  Lamb  for  calling  the 
'Ancient  Mariner'  'a  Dutch  attempt  at  German  sublimity.' 
A  phrase  in  the  same  letter  precisely  defines  that  quality  of 
'the  material  sublime'  which  was  all  that  Southey  himself 
ever  captured:  'Thalaba'  and  'Kehama'  are  'fertile  in  un- 
meaning miracles.'  It  still  puzzles  the  mind  that  any  one  who 
had  read  Coleridge  and  also  'Sakuntala'  could  have  con- 
structed these  empty  frameworks,  gaudy  with  far-fetched 
rags  of  many  colours,  which  collapse  at  a  touch  or  breath; 


158     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

empty  of  the  magic  of  Coleridge,  and  of  the  wisdom  of '  Sakun- 
tala.'  A  quiet  home-keeping  temper  of  mind  is  seen  moving 
about  in  worlds  not  realised,  in  which  for  every  reader,  as  for 
Lamb,  'the  imagination  goes  sinking  and  floundering.'  We 
see  him  reaching  wildly  after  the  local  colour  of  the  East, 
and  yet,  while  trying  to  weave  an  Eastern  pattern,  boasting 
that  'there  was  nothing  Oriental  in  the  style.'  It  is  as  if  a 
traveller  brought  back  foreign  fripperies  from  far  countries, 
and  hung  himself  all  over  with  them,  not  in  manner  native  to 
them,  or  to  him.  For  all  his  deliberate  heapings  up  of  horror 
and  amazement,  his  combinations  of  violence  without  heat 
and  adventures  without  vital  motion,  Southey  was  no  born 
romantic,  but  the  solitary  seeker  after  romance,  writing 
among  his  books,  and  seeking  in  them  the  atmosphere,  and  in 
his  subjects  the  imagination,  which  he  should  have  brought 
with  him,  for  they  are  to  be  found  in  no  books  and  in  no  sub- 
jects. His  incidents  are  impossible,  but  have  none  of  that 
strangeness  which  is  one  of  the  properties  of  beauty;  his 
seminary  of  sorcerers,  his  Glendoveers  and  Azyoruca,  his 
demons  and  deities  of  Indian  and  Arabian  mythology,  have 
no  power  over  the  mind  or  the  senses;  in  the  horrors  of  his 
slaughtering  and  suffering  immortals  there  is  no  thrill.  A 
shadow  on  the  wall,  a  footstep  on  an  empty  road,  is  enough 
material  for  the  true  master  of  terrors  to  chill  the  soul  with. 
Southey  wrecks  many  heavens  and  many  hells,  and  does 
not  quicken  a  pulse. 

In  one  of  his  letters  defending  '  Kehama '  against  some  one 
who  had  not  admired  it,  Southey  says : '  It  is  just  as  impossible 
to  give  a  taste  for  works  of  imagination  as  it  is  to  give  a  taste 
for  music.  .  .  .  This  is  their  use :  to  take  us  out  of  ourselves, 
to  carry  us  into  the  world  of  unrealities,  to  busy  us  with  some- 
thing which  is  not  immediately  connected  with  flesh  and  blood, 
to  elevate  rather  than  to  affect,  and  to  make  us  perceive  our 
imaginative  power,  instead  of  constantly  referring  us  to  ordi- 
nary feelings.'     In  thus  writing  Southey  made  the  twofold 


ROBERT  SOUTHEY  159 

mistake  of  supposing  that  he  had  imagination,  and  that  im- 
agination could  only  or  could  ever  live  in  a  world  of  unrealities. 
The  fundamental  criticism  of  Southey  as  a  poet  is  to  be  found 
in  an  entry  in  Crabb  Robinson's  diary,  in  the  year  1812. 
'Wordsworth  when  alone,'  he  says,  'speaking  of  Southey, 
said  he  is  one  of  the  cleverest  men  now  living.  At  the  same 
time  he  justly  denies  him  ideality  in  his  works.  He  never  en- 
quires, says  Wordsworth,  on  what  idea  his  poem  is  to  be 
wrought ;  what  feeling  or  passion  is  to  be  excited ;  but  he  deter- 
mines on  a  subject,  and  then  reads  a  good  deal,  and  combines 
and  connects  industriously;  but  he  does  not  give  anything 
which  impresses  the  mind  strongly,  and  is  recollected  in  soli- 
tude.' 

Take,  for  instance,  'Roderick,  the  Last  of  the  Goths/  the 
latest  and  perhaps  the  best  of  the  epics.  The  narrative  is  told 
with  simplicity,  with  dignity;  there  is,  as  Lamb  says,  'firm 
footing'  in  it;  the  verse  is  quiet,  and  might  contain  good 
poetry,  if  it  were  not  presented  as  a  substitute  for  it.  It  is  the 
rarest  thing  for  a  narrative  poem,  unless  the  narrative  is  an 
excuse  and  not  an  object,  to  be  anything  but  prose  disguised  ; 
here  the  narrative  is  everything,  and  we  can  but  wonder 
why  it  has  been  written  in  blank  verse  rather  than  in  prose. 
No  unexpected  beauty,  light  or  music,  ever  comes  into  it; 
but  one  reads  on,  placidly  interested,  as  if  one  were  reading 
history.  'I  have  often  said,'  Southey  once  wrote  to  Landor, 
'that  I  learnt  how  to  see,  for  the  purposes  of  poetry,  from 
Gebir'  ;  and  there  are,  in  'Roderick,'  a  few  things  seen  in 
Landor's  manner ;  as  thus :  — 

'  and  when  she  stoopt 
Hot  from  the  chase  to  drink,  well  pleased  had  seen 
Her  own  bright  crescent,  and  the  brighter  face 
It  crowned,  reflected  there.' 

But  there  is  not  in  the  whole  long  poem  a  single  line  by  which 
one  could  recognise  it  at  sight  as  poetry;  not  a  line  of  the 
quality  of  two  at  least  in  a  single  passage,  quoted  loyally  but 


160     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

unwisely  from  '  Count  Julian/  in  the  footnotes  to  this  version 
of  the  same  story.  One  is  the  line  on  him  who  stands  and  sees 
the  flames  above  the  towers  — 

'Spire,  with  a  bitter  and  severe  delight'; 

and  the  other  on  him 

'whose  hills 
Touch  the  last  cloud  upon  the  level  sky.' 

In  those  lines  something  speaks,  which  is  not  the  voice  of 
prose ;  but  in  all  '  Roderick '  (can  we  say  in  all  Southey  ?)  no- 
thing which  is  not  the  voice  of  prose. 

When  I  ask  myself  if  there  is  not  in  all  Southey's  work  in 
verse  anything  which  might  not  as  well  have  been  written  in 
prose,  I  find  myself  hesitating  a  little  over  one  section  of  that 
work,  a  section  in  which  homely  quaintness  is  sometimes  com- 
bined with  a  grotesque  or  ironical  humour.  'Take  my  word 
for  it,  Sir/  said  Mr.  Edgworth  to  Southey,  'the  bent  of  your 
genius  is  for  comedy ' ;  and  I  think  Mr.  Edgworth  was  right. 
There  is  real  metrical  fun  in  'The  Cataract  of  Lodore/  and  in 
'  The  Old  Woman  of  Berkeley '  a  real  mastery  of  the  gruesome. 
In  the  verses  on  '  The  Holly  Tree '  there  is  a  certain  measure, 
and  in  the  verses  written  in  his  library  there  is  more,  of  a  pun- 
gent homeliness,  through  which  for  once  the  real  man  seems 
to  speak,  and  to  speak  straight.  But  better  than  any  of  these, 
because  it  combines  in  one  the  best  of  their  qualities,  is  '  The 
Battle  of  Blenheim/  where  the  irony  is  at  once  naive  and  pro- 
found, and  where  the  extreme  simplicity  of  the  form  is  part 
of  the  irony.  All  the  other  poems  may  be  compared  with  other 
better  things  of  the  same  kind,  as  '  The  Cataract  of  Lodore ' 
with  'The  Bells'  and  'The  Old  Woman  of  Berkeley'  with 
'The  Witch  of  Fyfe';  but  in  this  poem  Southey  is  himself,  and 
no  one  has  done  a  better  poem  of  the  kind.  It  is  a  poem  of  the 
pedestrian  sort,  but  it  is  good  of  its  sort.  Southey's  talent  was 
pedestrian,  and  it  was  his  misfortune  that  he  tried  to  fly,  with 
wings  made  to  order,  and  on  his  own  pattern,  and  a  misfit. 


rY  J 


CHARLES  LAMB  161 


ROBERT  TANNAHILL  (1774-1810)  > 

Robert  Tannahill  was  born  at  Paisley  in  1774,  and  worked 
at  the  loom  all  his  life,  making  up  his  songs  as  he  worked,  and 
fitting  new  words  to  old  tunes.  Ill-health  and  disappointment 
seem  to  have  turned  him  melancholy-mad,  and  after  burning 
all  his  manuscripts  he  drowned  himself  in  the  river  in  the  year 
1810.  He  left  a  local  fame  which  has  spread,  although  the 
editor  of  his  poems  says  naively:  'They  do  not  interest  the 
readers  so  much  as  he  seems  to  have  expected.'  His  own 
attitude  was  unnecessarily  humble,  and  he  apologised  for  his 
work  as  '  the  effusions  of  an  unlettered  mechanic,  whose  hopes, 
as  a  poet,  extend  no  further  than  to  be  reckoned  respectable 
among  the  minor  bards  of  his  country.'  His  songs  are  written 
spontaneously,  often  with  real  felicities  of  phrase,  and  almost 
always  with  a  natural  knack  for  that  almost  inarticulate 
jingle  and  twinkle  which  goes  with  the  genuine  gallop  of  the 
Scottish  tongue.  Like  all  writers  who  are  neither  lettered  nor 
unlettered  he  is  not  always  sure  of  his  own  limits,  and  does 
not  realise  what  he  loses  by  leaving  his  'bonnie  woods  and 
braes'  for  an  unrealised  world  where  'Vengeance  drives  his 
crimson  car.'  The  sentimentality  of  the  moment,  sad  or  joy- 
ous, rarely  goes  deep  enough  to  retain  any  permanent  heat  in 
songs,  improvised  with  natural  skill,  and  never  better  than 
when  they  are  savoured  with  petulance  or  homely  humour. 


CHARLES  LAMB   (1775-1834)  3 

?  I  reckon  myself  a  dab  at  prose  —  verse  I  leave  to  my  betters,' 
Lamb  once  wrote  to  Wordsworth ;  and,  in  a  letter  to  Charles 

1  (1)  Poems,  1807.   (2)  Works,  1838,  1873. 

3  (1)  Blank  Verse,  by  Charles  Lloyd  and  Charles  Lamb,  1798.  (2)  John 
Woodvil,  1802.  (3)  Works,  2  vols.,  the  first  containing  collected  poems, 
1818.    (4)  Album  Verses,  1830.    (5)  Poetical  Works,  1836. 


162     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Lloyd,  he  tells  him,  by  way  of  praise,  'your  verses  are  as  good 
and  as  wholesome  as  prose.'  'Those  cursed  Dryads  and  Pagan 
trumperies  of  modern  verse  have  put  me  out  of  conceit  of  the 
very  name  of  poetry/  he  has  just  said.  At  the  age  of  twenty- 
one  he  talks  of  giving  up  the  writing  of  poetry.  '  At  present,' 
he  writes  to  Coleridge,  '  I  have  not  leisure  to  write  verses,  nor 
anything  approaching  to  a  fondness  for  the  exercise.  .  .  . 
The  music  of  poesy  may  charm  for  awhile  the  importunate 
teasing  cares  of  life ;  but  the  teased  and  troubled  man  is  not 
in  a  disposition  to  make  that  music'  Yet,  as  we  know,  Lamb, 
who  had  begun  with  poetry,  returned  to  the  writing  of  poetry 
at  longer  or  shorter  intervals  throughout  his  whole  life:  was 
this  prose-writer,  in  whom  prose  partook  so  much  of  the 
essence  of  poetry,  in  any  real  or  considerable  sense  a  poet? 

The  name  of  Lamb  as  a  poet  is  known  to  most  people  as 
the  writer  of  one  poem.  '  The  Old  Familiar  Faces '  is  scarcely 
a  poem  at  all ;  the  metre  halts,  stumbles,  there  is  no  touch  of 
magic  in  it;  but  it  is  speech,  naked  human  speech,  such  as 
rarely  gets  through  the  lovely  disguise  of  verse.  It  has  the 
raw  humanity  of  Walt  Whitman,  and  almost  hurts  us  by  a 
kind  of  dumb  helplessness  in  it.  A  really  articulate  poet  could 
never  have  written  it ;  here,  the  emotion  of  the  poet  masters 
him  as  he  speaks;  and  you  feel,  with  a  strange  thrill,  that 
catch  in  his  breath  which  he  cannot  help  betraying.  There 
are  few  such  poems  in  literature,  and  no  other  in  the  work 
of  Lamb. 

For  Lamb,  with  his  perfect  sincerity,  his  deliberate  and 
quite  natural  simplicity,  and  with  all  that  strange  tragic 
material  within  and  about  him  (already  coming  significantly 
into  the  naive  prose  tale  of  'Rosamund  Gray'),  was  unable 
to  work  directly  upon  that  material  in  the  imaginative  way  of 
the  poet,  unable  to  transform  its  substance  into  a  creation  in 
the  form  of  verse.  He  could  write  about  it,  touchingly  some- 
times, more  or  less  tamely  for  the  most  part,  in  a  way  that 
seems  either  too  downright  or  too  deliberate.    'Cultivate 


CHARLES  LAMB  163 

simplicity,  Coleridge,'  he  wrote,  with  his  unerring  tact  of 
advice,  '  or  rather,  I  should  say,  banish  elaborateness ;  for  sim- 
plicity springs  spontaneous  from  the  heart,  and  carries  into 
daylight  its  own  modest  buds  and  genuine,  sweet,  and  clear 
flowers  of  expression.  I  allow  no  hot-beds  in  the  gardens  of 
Parnassus.'  This  simplicity,  which  was  afterwards  to  illumi- 
nate his  prose,  is  seen  in  his  verse  almost  too  nakedly,  or  as 
if  it  were  an  end  rather  than  a  means. 

Lamb's  first  master  was  Cowper,  and  the  method  of  Cowper 
was  not  a  method  that  could  ever  help  him  to  be  himself. 
But,  above  all,  verse  itself  was  never  as  much  of  a  help  to 
him  as  it  was  a  hindrance.  Requiring  always,  as  he  did,  to 
apprehend  reality  indirectly,  and  with  an  elaborately  prepared 
ceremony,  he  found  himself  in  verse  trying  to  be  exactly  truth- 
ful to  emotions  too  subtle  and  complex  for  his  skill.  He  could 
but  set  them  down  as  if  describing  them,  as  in  most  of  that 
early  work  in  which  he  took  himself  and  his  poetry  most 
seriously.  What  was  afterwards  to  penetrate  his  prose,  giving 
it  that  savour  which  it  has,  unlike  any  other,  is  absent  from 
his  almost  saltless  verse.  There  is  the  one  inarticulate  cry, '  The 
Old  Familiar  Faces,'  and  then,  for  twenty  years  and  more, 
only  one  or  two  wonderful  literary  exercises,  like  the  mad 
verses  called  'A  Conceipt  of  Diabolical  Possession,'  and  the 
more  intimate  fantasy  of  the  '  Farewell  to  Tobacco '  ('  a  little 
in  the  way  of  Withers'),  with  one  love-song,  in  passing,  to  a 
dead  woman  whom  he  had  never  spoken  to. 

The  Elizabethan  experiments,  'John  Woodvil,'  and,  much 
later,  'The  Wife's  Trial,'  intervene,  and  we  see  Lamb  under 
a  new  aspect,  working  at  poetry  with  real  ambition.  His 
most  considerable  attempt,  the  work  of  his  in  verse  which  he 
would  most  have  liked  to  be  remembered,  was  the  play  of 
'John  Woodvil.'  'My  tragedy,'  he  wrote  to  Southey,  at  the 
time  when  he  was  finishing  it,  '  will  be  a  medley  (as  I  intend 
it  to  be  a  medley)  of  laughter  and  tears,  prose  and  verse,  and 
in  some  places  rhyme,  songs,  wit,  pathos,  humour,  and,  if 


164     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

possible,  sublimity ;  at  least,  it  is  not  a  fault  in  my  intention 
if  it  does  not  comprehend  most  of  these  discordant  colours.' 
It  was  meant,  in  short,  to  be  an  Elizabethan  play,  done,  not  in 
the  form  of  a  remote  imitation,  but  with  '  a  colloquial  ease  and 
spirit,  something  like  ■  Shakespeare,  as  he  says.  As  a  play,  it 
is  the  dream  of  a  shadow.  Reading  it  as  poetry,  it  has  a  strange 
combination  of  personal  quality  with  literary  experiment: 
an  echo,  and  yet  so  intimate;  real  feelings  in  old  clothes. 
The  subject  probably  meant  more  to  Lamb  than  people  have 
usually  realised.  I  do  not  doubt  that  he  wrote  it  with  a  full 
consciousness  of  its  application  to  the  tragic  story  which  had 
desolated  his  own  household,  with  a  kind  of  generous  casuistry, 
to  ease  a  somewhat  uneasy  mind,  and  to  be  a  sort  of  solace 
and  defence  for  Mary.  The  moral  of  it  is :  — 

'And  not  for  one  misfortune,  child  of  chance, 
No  crime,  but  unforeseen,  and  sent  to  punish 
The  less  offence  with  image  of  the  greater, 
Thereby  to  work  the  soul's  humility.' 

And  when  John  Woodvil,  after  his  trial,  begins  'to  understand 
what  kind  of  creature  Hope  is,'  and  bids  Margaret  'tell  me  if 
I  over-act  my  mirth/  is  there  not  a  remembrance  of  that  mood 
which  Lamb  had  confessed  to  Coleridge,  just  after  his  mother's 
funeral,  when  he  says,  'I  was  in  danger  of  making  myself  too 
happy? '  Some  touch  of  this  poignant  feeling  comes  into  the 
play  here  and  there,  but  not  vividly  enough  to  waken  it  wholly 
out  of  what  Southey  called  its  '  lukewarm '  state.  The  writing 
has  less  of  the  Elizabethan  rhetoric  and  more  of  the  quaint 
directness,  the  kindly  nature,  the  eager  interest  in  the  mind, 
which  those  great  writers  whom  Lamb  discovered  for  the 
modern  world  had  to  teach  him,  than  any  play  written  on 
similar  models.  I  am  reminded  sometimes  of  Heywood,  some- 
times of  Middleton ;  and  even  when  I  find  him  in  his  play  '  im- 
itating the  defects  of  the  old  writers,'  I  cannot  but  confess 
with  Hazlitt  that  'its  beauties  are  his  own,  though  in  their 
manner.'   Others  have  written  more  splendidly  in  the  Eliza- 


CHARLES  LAMB  165 

bethan  manner,  but  no  one  has  ever  thought  and  felt  so  like 
an  Elizabethan. 

After  one  much  later  and  slighter  experiment  in  writing 
plays  'for  antiquity,'  Lamb  went  back  to  occasional  writing, 
and  the  personal  note  returns  with  the  'Album  Verses'  of 
1830.  Lamb's  album  verses  are  a  kind  of  amiable  task-work, 
done  easily,  he  tells  us,  but  at  the  same  time  with  something 
painfully  industrious,  not  only  in  the  careful  kindness  of  the 
acrostic.  The  man  of  many  friends  forgets  that  he  is  a  man  of 
letters,  and  turns  amateur  out  of  mere  geniality.  To  realise 
how  much  he  lost  by  writing  in  verse  rather  than  in  prose,  we 
have  only  to  compare  these  careful  trifles  with  the  less  cared 
for  and  infinitely  more  exquisite  triflings  of  the  letters.  The 
difference  is  that  between  things  made  to  please  and  things 
made  for  pleasure.  In  the  prose  he  is  himself,  and  his  own 
master ;  in  the  verse  he  is  never  far  enough  away  from  his  sub- 
ject to  do  it  or  himself  justice;  and,  tied  by  the  metre,  has 
rarely  any  fine  freak  or  whimsical  felicity  such  as  came  to  him 
by  the  way  in  the  mere  turn  of  a  sentence  in  prose. 

More  than  of  any  poet  we  might  say  that  a  large  part  of 
his  poems  were  recreations.  We  might  indeed,  but  with  a 
different  meaning,  say  as  much  of  Herrick.  To  Herrick  his 
art  was  his  recreation,  but  then  his  recreation  was  his  art. 
He  has  absolute  skill  in  the  game,  and  plays  it  with  easy 
success.  Lamb  seems  to  find  playing  a  task,  or  allows  himself 
to  come  but  indifferently  through  it.  His  admiration  for 
'  Rose  Aylmer '  was  not  surprising,  for  there,  in  that  perfectly 
achieved  accident,  was  what  he  was  forever  trying  to  do. 

Yet,  at  times,  the  imprisoned  elf  within  him  breaks  forth, 
and  we  get  a  bubble  of  grotesque  rhymes,  as  cleverly  done  as 
Butler  would  have  done  them,  and  with  a  sad,  pungent  jollity 
of  his  own ;  or,  once  at  least,  some  inspired  nonsense,  in  parody 
of  himself,  the 

'  Angel-duck,  Angel-duck,  winged  and  silly, 
Pouring  a  watering-pot  over  a  lily ; ' 


166    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

together  with,  at  least  once,  in  the  piece  of  lovely  lunacy  called 
'The  Ape/  a  real  achievement  in  the  grotesque.  His  two 
task-masters, '  Work '  and  '  Leisure/  both  inspire  him  to  more 
than  usual  freedom  of  fancy.  And  it  is  among  the  'Album 
Verses '  that  we  find  not  only  those  '  whitest  thoughts  in  whit- 
est dress/  which,  for  the  Quakeress,  Lucy  Barton, 

1  best  express 
Mind  of  quiet  Quakeress,' 

but  also  the  solemn  fancy  of  the  lines  'In  My  Own  Album/ 
in  which  a  formal  and  antique  measure  is  put  to  modern  uses, 
and  the  jesting  figure  of  '  My  soul,  an  album  bright/  is  elabo- 
rated with  serious  wit  in  the  manner  of  the  'metaphysical' 
poets.  And  it  is  under  the  same  covers,  and  as  if  done  after 
the  same  pattern,  that  we  find  the  most  completely  successful 
of  his  poems,  the  lines  'On  an  Infant  Dying  as  Soon  as 
Born.'  The  subject  was  one  which  could  not  but  awaken  all 
his  faculties,  stirring  in  him  pity,  compassionate  wonder,  a 
tender  whimsicalness ;  the  thought  of  death  and  the  thought 
of  childhood  being  always  sure  to  quicken  his  imagination  to 
its  finest  utterance.  There  is  good  poetical  substance,  and  the 
form,  though  not  indeed  original,  is  one  in  which  he  moves 
with  as  natural  an  air  as  if  he  were  actually  writing  two  hun- 
dred years  ago.  It  was  in  this  brief,  packed, '  matterful '  way, 
full  of  pleasant  surprises,  that  his  favourite  poets  wrote ;  the 
metre  is  Wither's,  with  some  of  the  woven  subtleties  of  Marvell. 
With  Lamb,  more  than  with  most  poets,  the  subject-matter 
of  his  work  in  verse  determines  its  value.  He  needs  to  '  load 
every  rift  with  ore/  not  for  the  bettering,  but  for  the  mere 
existence,  of  a  poem.  In  his  pleasant  review  of  his  own  poems 
he  protests,  in  the  name  of  Vincent  Bourne,  against '  the  vague, 
dreamy,  wordy,  matterless  poetry  of  this  empty  age/  and  finds 
satisfaction  in  Bourne's  Latin  verses  because  'they  fix  upon 
something.'  For  him  that  '  something '  had  to  be  very  defi- 
nite, in  the  subject-matter  of  his  own  verse ;  and  it  was  not 


CHARLES  LLOYD  167 

with  the  mere  humility  of  self-depreciation  that  he  wrote  to 
Coleridge  in  1796:  'Not  that  I  relish  other  people's  poetry- 
less  —  their's  comes  from  'em  without  effort,  mine  is  the  diffi- 
cult operation  of  a  brain  scanty  of  ideas,  made  more  difficult 
by  disuse.'  He  was  a  poet  to  whom  prose  was  the  natural 
language,  and  in  verse  he  could  not  trust  himself  to  rove 
freely,  though  he  had  been  born  a  gipsy  of  the  mind. 

Even  in  his  best  work  in  verse  Lamb  has  no  singing  voice. 
The  poetry  of  those  lines  'On  an  Infant  Dying  as  Soon  as 
Born '  is  quite  genuine,  and  it  has  made  for  itself  a  form  ade- 
quate to  its  purpose ;  but  the  verse,  after  all,  is  rather  an  ac- 
companiment than  a  lifting;  and  'la  lyre,'  it  has  been  rightly 
said,  '  est  en  quelque  maniere  un  instrument  aileV  He  speaks 
in  metre,  he  does  not  sing;  but  he  speaks  more  delicately  in 
metre  than  any  one  else  not  born  a  singer. 


CHARLES  LLOYD  (1775-1839)  » 

'Your  verses  are  as  good  and  wholesome  as  prose,'  Lamb 
wrote  to  Lloyd  in  the  autumn  of  1823,  long  after  he  had  ceased 
to  see  him.  They  have  indeed  a  great  resemblance  to  prose, 
but  are  by  no  means  as  good  as  good  prose.  In  his  first  book 
of  verse,  'Poems on  Various  Subjects,'  1795,  through  which  he 
met  Coleridge,  there  is  an  Ode  to  Simplicity,  and  a  sonnet 
'occasioned  by  a  Domestic's  tears  at  parting  from  the  Author.' 
These,  as  well  as  a  sorry  address  to  a  beggar  woman,  seem 
to  have  anticipated  the  unconscious  humour  of  the  begin- 
nings of   Lamb,  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge.   None  of  the 

1  (1)  Poems  on  Various  Subjects,  1795.  (2)  Poems  by  S.  T.  Coleridge, 
second  edition,  to  which  are  now  added  Poems  by  Charles  Lamb  and 
Charles  Lloyd,  1797.  (3)  Blank  Verse  by  Charles  Lloyd  and  Charles  Lamb, 
1798.  (4)  Lines  suggested  by  the  Fast,  appointed  on  Wednesday,  February 
27, 1799,  1799.  (5)  The  Tragedies  of  Vittorio  Alfieri,  3  vols.,  1815.  (6)  De- 
sultory Thoughts  in  London,  Titus  and  Gissippus,  with  other  Poems,  1821. 
(7)  The  Duke  of  Ormond,  a  Tragedy,  and  Beritola,  a  Tale,  1822.  (8)  Poems, 
1823. 


168     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

three,  however,  not  Southey  even,  arrived  at  the  pitch  of  this 
last  stanza,  with  its  inconceivable  conclusion:  — 

'Ah!  what  shall  I  do,  I  am  poor 

Gentle  maid ! 
And  nip'd  by  chill  misery's  breath  — 
Yet  my  last  penny  take, 
It  may  buy  a  small  cake, 
And  preserve  thee  a  moment  from  death, 
WeU-a-dayl' 

Coleridge,  who  was  afterward  to  mock  Lloyd,  Lamb,  and  him- 
self for  these  dangerous  qualities,  was  soon  writing  a  sonnet 
addressed  '  To  a  Friend  who  asked,  How  I  felt  when  the  Nurse 
first  presented  my  Infant  to  me.'  In  1797  there  appeared  a 
volume  of '  Poems  by  S.  T.  Coleridge,  second  edition,  to  which 
are  now  added  Poems  by  Charles  Lamb  and  Charles  Lloyd/ 
'  My  Coleridge,  take  the  wanderer  to  thy  heart/  he  writes,  in 
the  muling  manner  of  the  moment;  but  the  gloom  is  already 
overshadowing  him,  and  we  find  Poems  on  'The  Melancholy 
Man '  and  '  The  Maniac ' :  — 

'  Poor  Maniac,  I  envy  thy  state 

When  with  sorrow  and  anguish  I  shrink  ; 
When  shall  I  be  wise  —  and  forget ! 
For  his  madness  to  feel  and  to  think  I ' 

The  Quaker  appears  in  the  next  book  of  '  blank  Verse '  written 
by  Lloyd  and  Lamb,  and  from  this  time  we  get  moral  musings 
against '  this  evil  spirit  misnamed  Liberty/  together  with  more 
wailing  of  this  sort :  — 

'  But  what  have  I  done  that  I  'm  thus  forsaken? 
Whom  have  I  injured  that  I'm  thus  neglected?' 

Coleridge  and  Lamb,  no  doubt,  would  be  meant,  with  whom  he 
had  quarrelled.  The  '  desultory  Thoughts  on  London/  written 
in  ottava  rima,  wandered  in  a  certainly  desultory  manner, 
from  'the  inefficacy  of  all  worldly  objects/  to  'reflection  on 
unfortunate  feelings '  (of  quite  a  kindly  character)  and  on  '  the 
reformation  produced  in  Newgate  by  Mrs.  Fry/   A  tragedy 


JOSEPH  BLANCO  WHITE  169 

in  verse  came  next,  dull  and  heavy,  with  notes  and  prefaces 
sometimes  as  amusing  as  this : '  It  was  not  until  the  following 
Tragedy  had  gone  through  the  press  to  nearly  the  middle  of 
the  fourth  act,  that  it  struck  the  author  that  the  feelings  of 
some  more  serious  friends  might  be  hurt  by  it.'  Three  vol- 
umes of  translations  from  Alfieri  had  preceded  this  volume, 
and  it  was  followed  in  1823  by  'Poems/  about  which  Lamb 
wrote  his  criticism.  Lamb  also  said :  '  Your  lines  are  not  to  be 
understood  reading  on  one  leg.' 


JOSEPH  BLANCO  WHITE  (1775-1840)  » 

Joseph  Blanco  White  was  a  Spaniard  by  birth  and  an  Irish- 
man by  nationality.  He  was  ordained  a  priest  in  Spain,  but  he 
abandoned  the  Catholic  Church  and  came  to  London  as  the 
editor  of  a  Spanish  newspaper,  afterwards  taking  orders  in  the 
Anglican  Church,  and  finally  relapsing  into  Unitarianism. 
He  is  remembered  in  English  literature  for  a  single  sonnet, 
of  great  beauty,  which  Coleridge  and  Leigh  Hunt  praised  with 
enthusiasm:  Coleridge  defining  it  as  'the  finest  and  most 
grandly  conceived  sonnet  in  our  language.'  The  last  line  sug- 
gests Coleridge,  in  its  imaginative  philosophy — 

'  If  Light  conceals  so  much,  wherefore  not  Life  ? ' 

and  an  earlier  line  has  a  single  flash  of  rhetorical  splendour: 

'  Hesperides  with  the  host  of  heaven  came.' 

1  Life  of  Rev.  Joseph  Blanco  White,  edited  by  J.  H.  Thorn,  3  vols., 
1845. 


170    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


THOMAS  DERMODY  (1775-1802)  * 

Thomas  Dermody  was  a  lyric  poet  whose  best  verses  were 
concerned  with  himself,  from  the  time  of  the  '  Poems  written 
between  the  thirteenth  and  sixteenth  years  of  his  age/  bidding 

1  No  Satan  come,  with  sawcer  eyes, 
In  shape  of  Fellows ! ' 

to  the  later  years  when  he  wrote  odes  to  himself :  — 

'  Thou  prince  of  jovial  fellows, 
Whose  little  span 
Is  spent  'twixt  poetry  and  ale  house.' 

Dermody  died  at  the  age  of  twenty-seven  in  a  wretched  hovel, 
shivering  over  a  few  embers;  an  insatiable  thirst  for  drink, 
together  'with  habits  so  eccentric,  principles  so  wild,  and 
passions  so  perverted,'  had  ruined  his  life,  and  left  him  to  die 
with  a  '  Hudibras '  on  the  table  by  his  side,  and  the  cynical 
words  on  his  life : '  You  see  I  am  merry  to  the  last.'  He  wrote 
with  immense  facility :  his  knowledge,  from  a  boy,  was  aston- 
ishing; at  fourteen  he  had  acquired  Greek,  Latin,  French, 
Italian,  and  a  little  Spanish.  His  poems  are  crude,  coarse, 
vigorous,  with  a  genuine  lyrical  swing,  after  this  manner :  — 

'Some  folks  there  are,  gay,  trim  and  fine, 
In  silk  and  sattins,  idly  flaming; 
But  she  I  love  is  all  divine, 
Their  artful  toil  and  dresses  shaming.' 

He  calls  himself  'a  giant  of  genius/  and  writes  ('oddest  of 
odd  compositions ' )  his  own  epitaph :  — 

'  Unnoticed  for  talents  he  had,  and  forgot, 
But  most  famously  noticed  for  faults  he  had  not.' 

1  (1)  Poems,  consisting  of  Essays,  Lyric,  Elegiac,  etc.,  by  Thomas 
Dermody,  written  between  the  thirteenth  and  sixteenth  years  of  his 
age,  1792.   (2)  The  Harp  of  Erin,  2  vols.,  1807- 


DR.  JOHN  LEYDEN  171 


DR.  JOHN  LEYDEN  (1775-1811) » 

In  the  kindly,  vivid,  and  critical  account  of  the  life  and  work 
of  John  Leyden,  Sir  Walter  Scott,  after  praising  him  as  a 
scholar,  for  his  early  knowledge  of  Latin,  Greek,  French, 
Spanish,  Italian,  German,  Icelandic,  Hebrew,  Arabic  and 
Persian,  and  the  ease  with  which  he  acquired  and  put  aside 
all  sciences  and  kinds  of  knowledge,  completes  the  picture 
by  adding  that  he  was  '  a  fearless  player  at  single-stick,  a  for- 
midable boxer,  a  distinguished  adept  at  leaping,  running, 
walking,  climbing,  and  all  exercises  which  depend  on  animal 
spirits  and  muscular  effort.'  His  appearance  in  society,  where 
he  imitated  the  manners  and  assumed  the  tone  of  a  Borderer 
of  former  times,  was,  it  seems,  'somewhat  appalling  to  persons 
of  low  animal  spirits.'  'Elasticity  and  ardour  of  genius'  are 
the  epithets  by  which  Scott  characterises  him  in  the  first 
sentence  of  his  memoir,  and  no  words  could  be  more  explicit. 
'  An  ardent  and  unutterable  longing  for  information  of  every 
description '  was  added  to  '  an  irresistible  thirst  for  discovery,' 
and  in  order  to  accompany  an  expedition  to  India  he  qualified 
himself  in  six  months  for  his  degree  in  medicine  and  surgery. 
There,  after  many  'adventures  to  outrival  the  witch  of  En- 
dor,'  given  up  five  times  by  the  doctors,  and  living  '  as  happy 
as  the  day  was  long,'  he  set  himself,  in  the  Indian  heats,  and 
in  the  intervals  of  his  duty  in  Indian  hospitals,  to  learn  Hin- 
dustani, Mahratta,  Tamal,  Telinga,  Canara,  Sanscrit,  Mala- 
yalam,  Malay,  Maldivian,  Mapella  and  Armenian.  It  was  the 
incessant  labour  of  an  abnormal  and  indefatigable  brain  that 
killed  him ;  and  he  died  '  as  devoted  a  martyr  in  the  cause  of 
science  as  ever  died  in  that  of  religion,'  as  Scott  said  of  him 
in  his  just  and  generous  way. 

As  a  poet  Leyden  had,  in  another  of  Scott's  acute  phrases, 

1  (1)  Poetical  Remains,  edited  by  James  Morton,  1819.   (2)  Poems  and 
Ballads,  edited  by  Robert  White,  with  Memoir  by  Sir  Walter  Scott,  1858. 


172     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'more  genius  than  taste/  though  there  is  taste,  as  well  as 
personal  feeling,  in  a  sonnet  on  '  The  Sabbath  Morning '  which 
deserves  a  place  in  anthologies.  Much  of  his  earlier  verse  was 
written  with  too  easy  a  facility,  and  in  the  manner  of  his  time. 
There  is  little  originality  even  in  the  ballad  of  'The  Mermaid/ 
of  which  Scott  made  the  extraordinary  statement  that  the- 
opening  of  it  'exhibits  a  power  of  numbers,  which,  for  the 
mere  melody  of  sound,  has  seldom  been  excelled  in  English 
poetry.'  'Lord  Soulis/  a  ballad  of  wizardy,  is  incomparably 
finer,  and  best  of  all  are  his  Malay  poems,  the  feverish  address 
to  his  green  agate-handled  kriss,  the  'Dirge  of  the  Departed 
Year/  together  with  the  'Finland  Mother's  Song/  the  'Arab 
Warrior/  and  'The  Fight  of  Praya/  a  Malay  dirge.  There  are 
a  few  others,  technically  finer,  such  as  '  The  Battle  of  Assaye/ 
which  was  probably  suggested,  in  its  ringing  metrical  effect,  by 
Campbell's  battle-songs,  but  it  is,  in  any  case,  on  a  level  with 
all  but  the  finest  of  them.  Here  is  one  of  the  vigorous  stanzas : 

'  But,  when  we  first  encountered  man  to  man, 
Such  odds  came  never  on, 
Against  Greece  or  Macedon, 
When  they  shook  the  Persian  throne 
Mid  the  old  barbaric  pomp  of  Ispahan.' 

Eastern  colour,  and  a  kind  of  ferocity,  is  to  be  found  in  the 
best  of  Leyden's  poems,  together  with  something  of  that  bat- 
tling and  indomitable  temperament  which  was  life  and  death 
to  him.  It  would  be  incorrect  to  call  him  a  scholarly  poet, 
but  there  was  a  wild  flicker  of  poetry  in  the  heart  of  a  scholar. 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  (1775-1864)  » 

Landor  has  said,  not  speaking  of  himself :  — 

'Wakeful  he  sits,  and  lonely,  and  unmoved, 
Beyond  the  arrows,  views,  or  shouts  of  men.' 

1  (1)  Poems,  1795.  (2)  A  Moral  Epistle,  1795.  (3)  Gebir,  1798;  second 
edition  with  Latin  version,  1803.  (4)  Poems  from  the  Arabic  and  Persian, 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  173 

And  of  himself  he  has  said,  in  perhaps  his  most  memorable 

lines :  — 

'I  strove  with  none,  for  none  was  worth  my  strife; 

Nature  I  loved,  and,  next  to  Nature,  Art; 
I  warmed  both  hands  before  the  fire  of  life ; 
It  sinks,  and  I  am  ready  to  depart.' 

In  the  preface  to  the  '  Heroic  Idyls '  he  writes :  '  He  who  is 
within  two  paces  of  the  ninetieth  year  may  sit  down  and  make 
no  excuses ;  he  must  be  unpopular,  he  never  tried  to  be  much 
otherwise,  he  never  contended  with  a  contemporary,  but 
walked  alone  on  the  far  eastern  uplands,  meditating  and  re- 
membering.' He  remains  alone  in  English  literature,  to  which 
he  brought,  in  verse  and  prose,  qualities  of  order  and  vehe- 
mence, of  impassioned  thinking  and  passionless  feeling,  not 
to  be  found  combined  except  in  his  own  work.  And  in  the 
man  there  was  a  like  mingling  of  opposites :  nobility  and  ten- 
derness, haste  and  magnanimity,  courtesy  and  irresponsible 
self-will,  whatever  is  characteristically  English  and  whatever 
is  characteristically  Roman,  with  the  defects  of  every  quality. 
Landor  is  monumental  by  the  excess  of  his  virtues,  which  are 
apt  to  seem,  at  times,  a  little  too  large  for  the  stage  and  scen- 
ery of  his  life.  He  desired  to  live  with  grandeur ;  and  there  is 
grandeur  in  the  outlines  of  his  character  and  actions.  But 
some  gust  of  the  will,  some  flurry  of  the  nerves,  was  always  at 
hand,  to  trouble  or  overturn  this  comely  order.  The  ancient 

1800.  (5)  Poetry  by  the  Author  of  '  Gebir,'  1802.  (6)  Simonidea,  1806. 
(7)  Ad  Gustavum  Regem,  Ad  Gustavum  exsulem,  1810.  (8)  Count  Julian, 
1812.  (9) IdylliaHeroica,18U.  (10) IdylliaHeroica decern,  1820.  (ll)Gebir, 
Count  Julian,  and  other  Poems,  1831.  (12)  Terry  Hogan,  1835.  (13)  Pen- 
talogia  (included  in  the  Pentameron),  1837.  (14)  A  Satire  on  Satirists  and 
Admonition  to  Detractors,  1837.  (15)  Andrea  of  Hungary  and  Giovanni 
of  Naples,  1839.  (16)  Fra  Rupert,  1840.  (17)  The  Siege  of  Ancona,  1842. 
(18)  Collected  Works,  2  vols.,  1846.  (19)  Poemata  et  Inscriptiones,  1847. 
(20)  The  Hellenics  of  Walter  Savage  Landor,  1847;  revised  and  enlarged 
edition,  1859.  (21)  Italics,  1848.  (22)  Five  Scenes  in  Verse  on  Beatrice 
Cenci  in  The  Last  Fruit  off  an  Old  Tree,  1853.  (23)  Scenes  for  the  Study, 
1856.  (24)  Dry  Sticks  fagoted  by  W.  S.  Landor,  1858.  (25)  Heroic  Idyls, 
1863. 


174     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Roman  becomes  an  unruly  child,  the  scholar  flings  aside  cap 
and  gown  and  leaps  into  the  arena. 

Landor  began  to  write  verse  when  he  was  a  schoolboy,  and 
it  is  characteristic  of  him  that  poetry  came  to  him  first  as  a 
school  exercise,  taken  for  once  seriously.  Latin  was  to  him, 
it  has  been  well  said,  'like  the  language  of  some  prior  state 
of  existence,  rather  remembered  than  learned.'  His  first 
book,  published  at  the  age  of  twenty,  contains  both  Latin  and 
English  verse,  together  with  a  defence,  in  Latin,  of  the  modern 
use  of  that  language.  When,  a  few  years  later,  he  began  to 
work  upon  his  first  serious  poem, '  Gebir,'  he  attempted  it  both 
in  Latin  and  in  English,  finally  decided  to  write  it  in  English, 
and,  later  on,  turned  it  also  into  Latin. 

'Gebir'  was  published  in  1798  the  year  of  the  'Lyrical 
Ballads,'  and,  in  its  individual  way,  it  marks  an  epoch  almost 
as  distinctly.  No  blank  verse  of  comparable  calibre  had  ap- 
peared since  the  death  of  Milton,  and,  though  the  form  was  at 
times  actually  reminiscent  both  of  Milton  and  of  the  Latin 
structure  of  some  of  the  portions  as  they  were  originally  com- 
posed, it  has  a  quality  which  still  remains  entirely  its  own. 
Cold,  sensitive,  splendid,  so  precise,  so  restrained,  keeping 
step  with  such  a  stately  music,  scarcely  any  verse  in  English 
has  a  more  individual  harmony,  more  equable,  more  refresh- 
ingly calm  to  the  ear.  It  contains  those  unforgettable  lines, 
which  can  never  be  too  often  repeated :  — 

1  But  I  have  sinuous  shells  of  pearly  hue 
Within,  and  they  that  lustre  have  imbibed 
In  the  sun's  palace-porch,  where  when  unyoked 
His  chariot-wheel  stands  midway  in  the  wave : 
Shake  one  and  it  awakens,  then  apply 
Its  polisht  lips  to  your  attentive  ear, 
And  it  remembers  its  august  abodes, 
And  murmurs  as  the  ocean  murmurs  there.' 

There  are  in  it  single  lines  like, — 

'  The  sweet  and  honest  avarice  of  love ' ; 

and  there  are  lines  marching  like  these :  — 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  175 

'  the  feast 
Was  like  the  feast  of  Cepheus,  when  the  sword 
Of  Phineus,  white  with  wonder,  shook  restrain'd, 
And  the  hilt  rattled  in  his  marble  hand. ' 

Has  not  that  the  tread  of  the  Commander  in  '  Don  Juan '  ? 
And  there  are  experiments  in  a  kind  of  naivete1 :  — 

'Compared  with  youth 
Age  has  a  something  like  repose.' 

Tennyson  is  anticipated  here :  — 

'  On  the  soft  inward  pillow  of  her  arm 
Rested  her  burning  cheek'; 

Mr.  Swinburne  here :  — 

'  The  silent  oars  now  dip  their  level  wings, 

And  weary  with  strong  stroke  the  whitening  wave.' 

But  where  the  most  intimately  personal  quality  of  Landor 
is  seen  is  in  the  lofty  homeliness  of  speech  which  is  always 
definite,  tangible,  and  about  definite,  tangible  things.  The 
Gadites  are  building,  and  Landor,  remembering  the  workmen 
he  has  seen  in  the  streets  of  Warwick,  notes :  — 

'  Dull  falls  the  mallet  with  long  labour  fringed.' 

Gebir  is  wrestling  with  the  nymph,  who  sweats  like  any  mortal ; 
Landor  does  not  say  so,  but  he  sets  her  visibly  before  us,  — 

'now  holding  in  her  breath  constrain'd, 
Now  pushing  with  quick  impulse  and  by  starts, 
Till  the  dust  blackened  upon  every  pore.' 

We  are  far  enough  from  Milton  here;  not  so  far,  perhaps, 
from  the  Latin  precision  of  statement ;  but  certainly  close  to 
reality.  And  it  is  reality  of  a  kind  new  to  English  poetry,  — 
painter's,  sculptor's,  reality,  —  discovered,  as  we  have  seen, 
at  precisely  the  moment  when  Wordsworth  was  discovering 
for  himself  the  reality  of  simple  feeling,  and  Coleridge  the 
reality  of  imaginative  wonder. 


176    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

A  few  years  after  'Gebir/  Landor  published  two  poems, 
'Chrysaor'  and  'The  Phocaeans/  and  then, for  many  years,  at 
long  intervals,  wrote,  and  occasionally  published,  other  poems 
in  Latin  and  English,  which  were  eventually  to  make  up  the 
'  Idyllia  Heroica '  and  the  '  Hellenics.'  They  are,  to  use  a  word 
which  Browning  was  to  invent  (having  learned  the  thing, 
perhaps  from  Landor),  dramatic  idyls.  The  most  perfect  of 
them,  'The  Death  of  Artemidora/  is  only  nineteen  lines  long; 
'  The  Last  of  Ulysses  ?  fills  fifty-five  pages  in  the  edition  of 
1847.  Landor  never  ceased  to  shift  their  places,  and  to  add, 
reject,  and,  above  all,  rewrite.  The  two  essentially  different 
texts  are  those  of  1847  and  1859;  and  it  is  necessary  to  com- 
pare these  with  each  other,  and  both  with  such  as  exist  also 
in  Latin,  if  we  would  trace  with  any  care  the  diligent  and  never 
quite  final  labour  which  Landor  gave  to  his  verse. 

In  the  poems  which  Landor  twice  translated  from  his  own 
Latin,  it  is  not  often  that  either  form  of  the  English  is  quite 
as  good  as  the  Latin,  and  it  is  not  always  easy  to  choose  be- 
tween the  two  versions,  of  which  the  first  is  usually  more  easy 
and  fluent,  while  the  second,  though  more  Latin,  is  often  more 
personal  to  Landor.  Often  the  second  version  is  nearer  to 
the  original,  as  in  the  opening  of  '  Coresus  and  Callirrhoe,' 
where  the  two  lines,  — 

'Impulit  adstantem  lascivior  una  ministram, 
Irrisitque  pedi  lapso  passisque  capillis,'  — 

are  first  rendered :  — 

1 A  playful  one  and  mischievous  pusht  on 
Her  who  stood  nearest,  laughing  as  her  foot 
Tript  and  her  hair  was  tangled  in  the  flowers ' ; 

and  afterwards :  — 

'  A  wanton  one  pusht  forward  her  who  stood 
Aside  her;  when  she  stumbled  they  all  laught 
To  see  her  upright  heels  and  scattered  hair.' 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  177 

Sometimes  the  earlier  version  is  the  more  literal,  but  the  later 
one  gains  by  condensation.  Thus  the  first  eight  lines  of  '  Cu- 
pid and  Pan '  follow  closely  the  first  six  lines  of  '  Cupido  et 
Pan,'  while  the  version  of  1859,  reduced  to  six  lines,  omits, 
without  loss,  a  line  of  the  Latin  which  had  filled  nearly  three 
lines  of  the  English.  This  process  of  condensation  will  be  seen 
in  lines  140-141  of  'Coresus  et  Callirrhoe,' 

1  gelidaeque  aspergine  lymphae, 
Et,  manibus  lapso  in  resonantia  marmora,  ferro ' ; 

rendered  literally  in  1847  :  — 

'  At  the  cold  sprinkling  of  the  sacred  lymph 
Upon  her  temples,  and  at  (suddenly 
Dropt,  and  resounding  on  the  floor)  the  sword ' ; 

and  in  1859  condensed  into  the  single  line, — 

'  And  the  salt  sprinklings  from  the  sacred  font.' 

The  aim  is  always  at  adding  more  weight,  in  the  clearing  away 
of  mere  detail,  with  only  an  occasional  strong  addition,  as,  a 
few  lines  lower,  'Less  mournfully  than  scornfully  said  he/ 
for  the  mere  'inquit'  of  the  original.  The  style  stiffens  into 
harder  marble  in  its  'rejection  of  what  is  light  and  minute.' 
Alike  from  what  is  gained  and  from  what  is  lost  in  this  re- 
casting we  see  how  uncertain,  with  all  his  care,  was  Landor's 
touch  on  English  verse,  how  a  Latin  sound  dominated  his 
ears  when  he  was  writing  English,  and  how  his  final  choice 
of  form  was  almost  invariably  of  the  nature  of  a  compromise, 
like  that  of  one  to  whom  his  native  tongue  was  foreign.  Com- 
pare the  two  versions  of  lines  30-34  of  'Veneris  Pueri' :  — 

'At  neque  propositum  neque  verba  superba  remittit, 

'  Ut  Chaos  antiquum  flamma  radiante  subegit, 
Ut  tenebras  pepulit  coelo,  luctantiaque  astra 
Stare,  vel  aeterno  jussit  prodire  meatu, 
Ut  pelago  imposuit  domito  confinia  rapes.' 

In  1847  'The  Children  of  Venus'  reads:  — 


178     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'  But  neither  his  proud  words  did  he  remit 
Nor  resolution :  he  began  to  boast 
How  with  his  radiant  fire  he  had  reduced 
The  ancient  Chaos;  how  from  heaven  he  drove 
The  darkness  that  surrounded  it,  and  drew 
Into  their  places  the  reluctant  stars, 
And  made  some  stand  before  him,  others  go 
Beyond  illimitable  space ;  then  curb'd 
The  raging  sea  and  chain'd  with  rocks  around.' 

In  1859  'The  Boys  of  Venus'  reads:  — 

'  Still  neither  would  he  his  intent  forego 
Nor  moderate  his  claim,  nor  cease  to  boast 
How  Chaos  he  subdued  with  radiant  fire, 
How  from  the  sky  its  darkness  he  dispell'd, 
And  how  the  struggling  planets  he  coerced, 
Telling  them  to  what  distance  they  might  go, 
And  chain'd  the  raging  Ocean  down  with  rocks.' 

Both  versions  are  fine,  though  the  second,  trying  to  follow  i 
the  Latin  more  closely  line  for  line,  abandons  the  freer  cadences  ii 
of  the  first ;  but  is  either  wholly  without  a  certain  constraint,  : 
which  we  do  not  feel  in  even  those  passages  of  Milton  most  I 
like  Latin?  And  is  there  not,  when  we  read  the  lines  in  Latin,  i 
a  sense,  not  due  to  mere  knowledge  of  the  fact,  that  we  are  I 
reading  an  original  after  a  translation? 

Yet  it  is  to  this  fact,  partly,  to  this  Latin  savour  in  English,   \ 
that  not  only  those  poems  of  Landor  which  were  first  written  il 
in  Latin,  but  others  also,  never  written  in  anything  but  Eng-  1 
lish,  owe  their  exceptional,  evasive,  almost  illegitimate  charm,  i 
What,  we  find  ourselves  saying,  is  this  unknown,  exquisite 
thing,  which  yet  seems  to  be  not  quite  poetry,  or  is  certainly  un- 
like anything  else  in  English  poetry?  A  perfume  clings  about 
it,  as  if  it  had  been  stored  for  centuries  in  cedar  chests,  and 
among  spices.   Nor  does  it  fail  to  respond  to  its  own  appeal :  — 

'  We  are  what  suns  and  winds  and  waters  make  us.' 

I  have  read  the  '  Hellenics,'  lying  by  the  seashore,  on  warm, 
quiet  days  when  I  heard  nothing  but  the  monotonous  repeti- 
tion of  the  sea  at  my  feet,  and  they  have  not  seemed  out  of 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  179 

key.  The  music  is  never  full-throated  or  organ  music,  but 
picked  out  note  by  note  on  a  reed-pipe,  a  slender  sound  with 
few  intervals.  And  it  is  with  truth  that  Landor  says,  in  the 
preface  to  the  edition  of  1859,  'Poetry,  in  our  day,  is  oftener 
prismatic  than  diaphanous :  this  is  not  so :  they  who  look  into 
it  may  see  through.  If  there  be  anywhere  a  few  small  air- 
bubbles,  it  yet  leaves  to  the  clear  vision  a  wide  expanse  of 
varied  scenery.' 

In  his  first  preface,  in  1847,  Landor  had  written :  'It  is  hardly 
to  be  expected  that  ladies  and  gentlemen  will  leave  on  a 
sudden  their  daily  promenade,  skirted  by  Turks  and  shepherds 
and  knights  and  plumes  and  palfreys,  of  the  finest  Tunbridge 
manufacture,  to  look  at  these  rude  frescoes,  delineated  on  an 
old  wall  high  up,  and  sadly  weak  in  colouring.  As  in  duty 
bound,  we  can  wait.  The  reader  (if  there  should  be  one)  will 
remember  that  Sculpture  and  Painting  have  never  ceased  to 
be  occupied  with  the  scenes  and  figures  which  we  venture  once 
more  to  introduce  into  poetry,  it  being  our  belief  that  what  is 
becoming  in  two  of  the  Fine  Arts  is  not  quite  unbecoming  in  a 
third,  the  one  which  indeed  gave  birth  to  them.'  The  '  Hellen- 
ics'  are  all  in  low  relief;  you  can  touch  their  surface,  but  not 
walk  round  them.  Some  are  moulded  in  clay,  some  carved  in 
marble ;  all  with  the  same  dispassionate  and  energetic  skill  of 
hand,  the  same  austere  sense  of  visible  beauty.  They  do  not 
imitate  the  variety  and  movement  of  life ;  they  resemble  the 
work  of  Flaxman  rather  than  the  work  of  Greek  sculpture,  and 
have  the  careful  charm  of  the  one  rather  than  the  restrained 
abundance  of  the  other.  They  wish  to  be  taken  for  what  they 
are,  figures  in  relief,  harmoniously  arranged,  not  without  a 
reasonable  decorative  likeness  to  nature.  The  contours  which 
have  arrested  them  are  suave,  but  a  trifle  rigid;  the  design 
has  proportion,  purity,  rarely  breadth  or  intensity.  The  planes 
are  never  obscured  or  unduly  heightened ;  no  figure,  suddenly 
starting  into  life,  throws  disarray  among  the  firmly  stationed 
or  sedately  posed  figures  around. 


180    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

With  all  his  care,  Landor  rarely  succeeds  in  seeming  spon- 
taneous; the  fastidiousness  of  the  choice  is  too  conspicuous, 
and  wounds  the  susceptibilities  of  the  mind,  as  one  who  too 
obviously  'picks  and  chooses'  wounds  the  susceptibilities 
of  a  host  or  a  friend.  His  touch,  above  all  things  sensitive, 
sometimes  misses  the  note ;  in  evading  the  brutality  of  state- 
ment, he  sometimes  leaves  his  meaning  half  expressed. 

'  The  shore  was  won ;  the  fields  markt  out ;  and  roofs 
Collected  the  dun  wings  that  seek  house-fare; 
And  presently  the  ruddy-bosom'd  guest 
Of  winter  knew  the  doors ;  then  infant  cries 
Were  heard  within ;  and  lastly,  tottering  steps 
Pattered  along  the  image-stationed  hall.' 

It  is  not  without  some  intent  deciphering  that  any  one  will 
realise  from  these  hints  that  the  passage  of  three  years  is 
meant  to  be  indicated  in  them.  Landor  prefers  to  give  you  a 
sort  of  kej'',  which  he  expects  you  to  fit  in  the  lock,  and  turn 
there;  there  is  disdain  in  his  way  of  stopping  short,  as  with  a 
half- courteous  and  half-contemptuous  gesture.  For  the  most 
part  he  hints  at  what  has  happened  by  mentioning  an  unim- 
portant, but  visible,  consequence  of  it. 

Landor's  chief  quality  is  sensitiveness;  and  this  is  seen 
equally  in  his  touch  on  verse  and  in  the  temper  of  his  daily 
life.  The  root  of  irritability  is  sensitiveness ;  and  sensitiveness 
is  shown  by  Landor  when  he  throws  the  cook  out  of  the  win- 
dow upon  the  flower-bed,  and  not  only  when  he  remembers 
that  he  has  'forgotten  the  violets.'  All  his  prejudices,  un- 
reasons, the  occasional  ungentlemanliness  of  his  enraged 
caprices,  come  from  this  one  source.  We  trace  it  in  his  attitude 
of  angry  contempt  toward  Byron :  '  "  Say  what  you  will," 
once  whispered  a  friend  of  mine,  "there  are  things  in  him 
strong  as  poison,  and  original  as  sin."  '  We  trace  it  in  his 
refusal  to  call  on  Shelley,  when  the  poet,  whom  he  admired  pro- 
foundly, was  his  neighbour  in  Pisa.  He  marries  precipitately, 
at  the  sight  of  '  the  nicest  girl  in  the  room/  at  a  provincial  ball, 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  181 

and  leaves  his  wife  in  Jersey,  to  cross  over  to  France,  alone 
in  an  open  boat,  because  she  has  reminded  him  before  her 
sister  that  he  is  older  than  she  is.  Throughout  life  his  bluster 
was  the  loud,  assumed  voice  of  a  sensitive  nature,  hurt  to 
anger  by  every  imperfection  that  disconcerted  his  taste. 

And  sensitiveness  makes  his  verse  shrink  away  from  any 
apparent  self-assertion,  all  in  little  shivers,  like  the  nymph's 
body  at  the  first  cold  touch  of  the  river.  He  heard  a  music 
which  seemed  to  beat  with  too  definite  a  measure,  and  he  often 
draws  back  his  finger  from  the  string  before  he  has  quite 
sounded  the  note,  so  fearful  is  he  lest  the  full  twang  should  be 
heard.  The  words  pause  half  uttered ;  what  they  say  is  never 
more  than  a  part  of  what  they  mean,  as  the  tune  to  which 
they  say  it  always  supposes  a  more  ample  melody  completing 
it  behind  the  silence.  In  that  familiar  ending  of  '  The  Death 
of  Artemidora/  — 

'and  now  a  loud  deep  sob 
Swell'd  thro'  the  darken'd  chamber :  't  was  not  hers,'  — 

we  find  this  shy  reticence,  which  from  an  idiosyncrasy  has 
become  almost  a  method. 

Landor  was  a  scholar  of  beauty,  and  it  was  with  almost 
too  disinterested  an  homage,  too  assured  at  once  and  too  shy, 
that  he  approached  the  Muses.  'The  kingdom  of  heaven 
suffereth  violence/  and  poetry  wants  to  be  wooed  by  life. 
Landor  was  not  a  strong  man ;  he  was  a  loud  weak  man ;  in  his 
life  we  see  the  tumult,  and  only  in  his  verse  'the  depth  and 
not  the  tumult  of  the  soul.'  His  work  is  weakness  made  mar- 
moreal ;  the  explosive  force  tamed,  indeed,  but  tamed  too  well, 
showing  the  lack  of  inner  fire,  so  busy  with  rocks  and  lava 
on  the  surface.  That  is  why  it  becomes  tedious  after  a  little ; 
because  life  comes  and  goes  in  it  but  capriciously,  like  the 
shooting  flames  of  his  life ;  it  is  not  warmed  steadily  through- 
out. 

Something  of  this  may  have  been  in  Coleridge's  mind  when 
he  said,  in  the  'Table-Talk'  of  January  1,  1834,  'What  is  it 


182    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

that  Mr.  Landor  wants,  to  make  him  a  poet?  His  powers  are 
certainly  very  considerable,  but  he  seems  to  be  totally  defi- 
cient in  that  modifying  faculty  which  compresses  several  units 
into  one  whole.  The  truth  is,  he  does  not  possess  imagination 
in  its  highest  form, — that  of  stamping  il  piu  nell'  uno.  Hence 
his  poems,  taken  as  wholes,  are  unintelligible ;  you  have  emi- 
nences excessively  bright,  and  all  the  ground  around  and  be- 
tween them  in  darkness.'  And  he  adds,  'Besides  which,  he 
has  never  learned,  with  all  his  energy,  how  to  write  simple  and 
lucid  English.' 

Is  it,  really,  imagination  which  he  lacks?  In  some  lines 
addressed  to  Barry  Cornwall,  Landor  states  his  own  theory:  — 

'  Imagination's  paper  kite, 
Unless  the  string  is  held  in  tight, 
Whatever  fits  and  starts  it  takes, 
Soon  bounces  on  the  ground,  and  breaks.' 

Landor  holds  in  the  string  so  tight  that  the  kite  never  soars 
to  the  end  of  its  tether.  In  one  of  his  many  fits  of  '  the  pride 
that  apes  humility,'  he  writes :  — 

'And  yet,  perhaps,  if  some  should  tire 
Of  too  much  froth  or  too  much  fire, 
There  is  an  ear  that  may  incline 
Even  to  words  so  dull  as  mine.' 

He  was,  indeed,  averse  to  both  froth  and  fire,  and  there  is 
nothing  of  either  in  his  temperate  and  lofty  work.  Yet  there 
are  times  when  he  lets  his  Muse  grow  a  little  thin  on  an  Arab 
fare,  dates  and  water,  in  his  dread  of  letting  her  enter  '  Litera- 
ture's gin-palaces.' 

It  is  in  Landor's  dramatic  work  that  we  see,  perhaps  more 
clearly  than  elsewhere,  the  point  beyond  which  he  could  not 
go,  though  nowhere  else  in  his  work  do  we  see  more  clearly  his 
nobility  of  attitude  and  his  command  of  grave  and  splendid 
verse.  Landor's  method  in  dialogue  is  a  logical  method ;  the 
speeches  are  linked  by  a  too  definite  and  a  too  visible  chain; 
they  do  not  spring  up  out  of  those  profound,  subconscious 


WALTER  SAVAGE   LANDOR  183 

affinities,  which,  in  the  work  of  the  great  dramatists,  mimic 
Nature  with  all  her  own  apparent  irregularity.  Coleridge, 
writing  of  'The  Tempest/  has  noticed  in  Shakespeare,  with 
deep  insight : '  One  admirable  secret  of  his  art  is,  that  separate 
speeches  frequently  do  not  appear  to  have  been  occasioned 
by  those  which  preceded,  and  which  are  consequent  upon  each 
other,  but  to  have  arisen  out  of  the  peculiar  character  of  the 
speaker.'  How  minutely  Landor  follows  the  mechanical  regu- 
larity of  logic  and  association  of  ideas  will  be  seen  if  we  turn 
to  almost  any  page  of  his  dramas.  In  the  second  scene  of  the 
second  act  of  'Count  Julian,'  one  speech  of  Julian's  ends: 
'  Remember  not  our  country ' ;  and  Covilla  echoes :  — 

'Not  remember! 
What  have  the  wretched  else  for  consolation?' 

She  dwells  on  her  desire  of  her  own  country,  and  Julian  con- 
tinues, rather  than  replies :  — 

'Wide  are  the  regions  of  our  far-famed  land.' 

Covilla  responds  in  the  same  key,  and  ends  her  speech  with  the 
words :  — 

'Outcast  from  virtue,  and  from  nature,  too.' 

It  is  now  Julian  who  becomes  the  echo :  — 

'  Nature  and  virtue !  they  shall  perish  first.' 

His  long  speech  ends  with  a  reflection  that  the  villagers,  if 
they  came  among  them,  — 

'Would  pity  one  another  less  than  us, 
In  injury,  disaster,  or  distress.' 

Covilla  instantly  catches  the  word  'pity,'  and  replies:  — 

'  But  they  would  ask  each  other  whence  our  grief, 
That  they  might  pity.' 

Landor,  to  forestall  criticism,  tells  us  that  '  Count  Julian ' 
is  'rather  a  dialogue  than  a  drama ' ;  but  it  adopts  the  dramatic 
form,  and  even  the  form  of  French  drama,  in  which  the  en- 


184     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

trance  of  a  new  speaker  begins  a  new  scene.  It  could  very- 
well  be  presented  by  marionettes  with  sonorous  voices,  speak- 
ing behind  the  scenes.  Landor  never  sees  his  people;  they 
talk  unmoved,  or  enunciate  a  sudden  emotion  with  unnatural 
abruptness.  The  verse  is  too  strict  and  stern,  within  measured 
Miltonic  limits,  for  dramatic  speech,  or  even  for  lifelike  dia- 
logue ;  thus :  — 

'  If  strength  be  wanted  for  security, 
Mountains  the  guard,  forbidding  all  approach 
With  iron-pointed  and  uplifted  gates, 
Thou  wilt  be  welcome  too  in  Aguilar, 
Impenetrable,  marble-turreted.' 

Yet  there  are  moments  when  the  Miltonic  speech  becomes, 
as  it  can  become,  nakedly  dramatic :  — 

1  Heaven  will  inflict  it,  and  not  I  .  .  .  but  I 
Neither  will  fall  alone  nor  live  despised.' 

To  Landor  his  own  people  were  very  real ;  and  he  says,  '  I 
brought  before  me  the  various  characters,  their  forms,  com- 
plexions, and  step.  In  the  daytime  I  laboured,  and  at  night 
unburdened  my  mind,  shedding  many  tears.'  But  between 
this  consciousness  of  a  step  heard  in  the  mind,  and  a  working 
knowledge  of  the  movement  of  an  actor  across  the  stage,  there 
is  a  great  gulf;  and  Landor  never  crossed  it.  He  aimed  at 
producing  the  lofty  effect  of  Greek  tragedy,  but  in  reading 
Sophocles  he  seems  never  to  have  realised  the  unerring,  the 
infinitely  ingenious  playwright,  to  whom  speech  is  first  of  all 
the  most  direct  means  of  setting  his  characters  to  make  his 
plot.  Landor  endows  each  of  his  characters  with  a  few  unvary- 
ing sentiments,  and  when  several  characters  meet  in  action 
they  do  but  give  dignified  expression,  each  as  if  speaking  by 
himself,  to  those  sentiments.  The  clash  of  wills,  which  makes 
drama,  may  be  loud  enough  somewhere  off  the  stage,  but  here 
it  is  but  'recollected  in  tranquillity.' 

Landor  is  a  great  master  of  imagery,  and  in  '  Count  Julian ' 
there  are  many  lines  like  these :  — 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  185 

'  Gryphens  and  eagles,  ivory  and  gold, 
Can  add  no  clearness  to  the  lamp  above; 
Yet  many  look  for  them  in  palaces 
Who  have  them  not,  and  want  them  not,  at  home.' 

Note  how  precise,  how  visual  (in  his  own  remote,  sumptuous 
way),  is  the  image;  and  how  scrupulous  the  exactitude  of  the 
thought  rendered  by  the  image.  But  the  image  is,  after  all, 
no  more  than  just  such  an  ornamentation  of  'gryphens  and 
eagles,  ivory  and  gold '  to  a  thought  separately  clear  in  itself. 
The  image  is  not  itself  the  most  vital  part  of  the  speech. 
Take,  again,  the  speech  of  Julian  to  Roderigo,  in  which  an 
image  is  used  with  more  direct  aim  at  dramatic  effect :  — 

'  I  swerve  not  from  my  purpose :  thou  art  mine, 
Conquer'd;  and  I  have  sworn  to  dedicate, 
Like  a  torn  banner  on  my  chapel's  roof, 
Thee  to  the  power  from  whom  thou  hast  rebelled.' 

In  my  copy  of  the  first  collected  edition  of  Landor's  poems 
some  one  has  marked  these  last  two  lines ;  and  they  are  striking 
lines.    But  let  us  open  Shakespeare,  and  read,  say,  this :  — 

'  He  was  a  queen's  son,  boys : 
And  though  he  came  our  enemy,  remember 
He  was  paid  for  that :  though  mean  and  mighty,  rotting 
Together,  have  one  dust,  yet  reverence, 
That  angel  of  the  world,  doth  make  distinction 
Of  place  'twixt  high  and  low.' 

Here  the  superb  epithet,  'that  angel  of  the  world/  which 
seems  to  interrupt  a  straightforward  speech,  heightens  it  with 
meaning.  The  'torn  banner  on  the  chapel's  roof  is  only  a 
decoration;  it  shows  self-consciousness  in  the  speaker,  who 
thinks  aside,  in  an  unlikely  way,  and  for  effect. 

In  the  later  plays  and  scenes,  in  'The  Siege  of  Ancona/ 
and  in  the  'Beatrice  Cenci/  most  notably,  Landor  seems  to 
have  more  nearly  mastered  the  dramatic  method,  partly  by 
limiting  himself  to  briefer  and  less  complicated  action;  and 
he  has  finally  adopted  a  style  which  is  at  once  more  flexible 
and  more  beautiful.  In  'The  Siege  of  Ancona'  there  is  a  note 


186     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

of  almost  homely  heroism  which  comes  to  one  with  a  direct 
thrill;  in  'Beatrice  Cenci'  there  is  both  pity  and  terror;  a 
deep  tenderness  in  the  scene  between  Beatrice  and  Margarita, 
and,  in  the  last  scene,  where  the  citizens, '  at  a  distance  from  the 
scaffold,'  hear  the  groans  of  Beatrice  under  torture,  and  suffer 
indignant  agonies  with  each  groan,  a  profound  and  almost 
painful  beauty,  at  times  finding  relief  in  such  lines  as  these :  — 

'She  always  did  look  pale, 
They  tell  me;  all  the  saints,  and  all  the  good 
And  all  the  tender-hearted,  have  looked  pale. 
Upon  the  Mount  of  Olives  was  there  one 
Of  dawn-red  hue  even  before  that  day? 
Among  the  mourners  under  Calvary 
Was  there  a  cheek  the  rose  had  rested  on?' 

In  some  of  the  briefer  scenes,  those  single  conversations  in 
which  Landor  could  be  so  much  more  himself  than  in  anything 
moving  forward  from  scene  to  scene,  there  are  lines  that  bite 
as  well  as  shine;  such  lines  as  those  of  the  drunken  woman 
who  has  drowned  her  child :  — 

'Febe.  I  sometimes  wish  't  were  back  again. 
Griselda.  To  cry? 

Febe.  Ah !  it  does  cry  ere  the  first  sea-mew  cries ; 
It  wakes  me  many  mornings,  many  nights, 
And  fields  of  poppies  could  not  quiet  it.' 

It  is,  after  all,  for  their  single  lines,  single  speeches,  separate 
indications  of  character  (the  boy  Caesarion  in  'Antony  and  Oc- 
tavius,'  the  girl  Erminia  in  'The  Siege  of  Ancona,'  a  strain  of 
nobility  in  the  Consul,  of  honesty  in  Gallus,  Inez  de  Castro  at 
the  moment  of  her  death),  that  we  remember  these  scenes.  If 
we  could  wholly  forget  much  of  the  rest,  the  '  rhetoric-roses/ 
not  always  'supremely  sweet,'  though  'the  jar  is  full,'  the 
levity  without  humour,  and,  for  the  most  part,  without  grace, 
the  '  giggling '  women  (he  respects  the  word,  and  finds  it,  in 
good  Greek,  in  Theocritus),  the  placid  arguing  about  emotions, 
his  own  loss  of  interest,  it  would  seem,  in  some  of  these  pages 
as  he  wrote  them,  we  might  make  for  ourselves  in  Landor 


WALTER  SAVAGE  LANDOR  187 

what  Browning  in  a  friendly  dedication  calls  him,  'a  great 
dramatic  poet/  and  the  master  of  a  great  and  flawless  dramatic 
style. 

There  is  another  whole  section  of  Landor's  work,  consisting 
of  epigrams  and  small  poems,  more  numerous,  perhaps,  than 
any  English  poet  since  Herrick  has  left  us.  Throughout  his 
life  he  persistently  versified  trifles,  as  persistently  as  Words- 
worth, but  with  a  very  different  intention.  Wordsworth  tries 
to  give  them  a  place  in  life,  so  to  speak,  talking  them,  as  anec- 
dotes or  as  records  of  definite  feelings ;  while  Landor  snatches 
at  the  feeling  or  the  incident  as  something  which  may  be  cun- 
ningly embalmed  in  verse,  with  almost  a  funereal  care.  Among 
these  poems  which  he  thus  wrote  there  are  immortal  successes, 
such  as  '  Dirce '  or  '  Rose  Aylmer/  with  many  memorable  epi- 
taphs and  epitomes,  and  some  notable  satires.  By  their  side 
the?8  is  no  inconsiderable  number  of  petty  trivialities,  graceful 
nothings,  jocose  or  sentimental  trifles.  With  a  far  less  instinc- 
tive sense  of  the  capacities  of  his  own  language  than  Herrick, 
Landor  refused  to  admit  that  what  might  make  a  poem  in 
Latin  could  fail  to  be  a  poem  in  English.  He  won  over  many 
secrets  from  that  close  language;  but  the  ultimate  secrets  of 
his  own  language  he  never  discovered.  Blake,  Shelley,  Keats, 
Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  among  his  contemporaries,  could  all  do 
something  that  he  could  not  do,  something  more  native,  more 
organically  English,  and  therefore  of  a  more  absolute  beauty 
as  poetry.  He  reads  Pindar  for  his  'proud  complacency  and 
scornful  strength.  If  I  could/  he  says,  'resemble  him  in  no- 
thing else,  I  was  resolved  to  be  as  compendious  and  as  ex- 
clusive.' From  Catullus  he  learned  more,  and  his  version  of 
one  of  the  lighter  poems  of  Catullus  has  its  place  to-day,  as  if 
it  were  an  original  composition,  among  the  mass  of  his  col- 
lected lyrics,  where  it  is  not  to  be  distinguished  from  the  pieces 
surrounding  it.  Yet,  if  you  will  compare  any  of  Landor's 
translations,  good  as  they  are,  with  the  original  Latin,  you 
will  see  how  much  of  the  energy  has  been  smoothed  out,  and 


188     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

you  will  realise  that,  though  Catullus  in  Landor's  English 
is  very  like  Landor's  English  verse,  there  is  something,  of  infi- 
nite importance,  characteristic  alike  of  Catullus  and  of  poetry, 
which  has  remained  behind,  uncapturable. 

Is  it  that,  in  Coleridge's  phrase,  'he  does  not  possess  im- 
agination in  its  highest  form '  ?  Is  it  that,  as  I  think,  he  was 
lacking  in  vital  heat? 

No  poet  has  ever  been  a  bad  prose-writer,  whenever  he  has 
cared  to  drop  from  poetry  into  prose;  but  it  is  doubtful 
whether  any  poet  has  been  quite  so  fine,  accomplished,  and 
persistent  a  prose-writer  as  Landor.  'Poetry,'  he  tells  us, 
in  one  of  his  most  famous  passages,  'was  always  my  amuse- 
ment, prose  my  study  and  business.  I  have  published  five 
volumes  of  "  Imaginary  Conversations  " :  cut  the  worst  of  them 
thro'  the  middle,  and  there  will  remain  in  this  decimal  fraction 
quite  enough  to  satisfy  my  appetite  for  fame.  I  shall  dine 
late ;  but  the  dining-room  will  be  well  lighted,  the  guests  few 
and  select.'  Without  his  prose  Landor  is  indeed  but  half,  if  he 
is  half,  himself.  His  verse  at  its  best  has  an  austere  nobility, 
a  delicate  sensitiveness,  the  qualities  of  marble  or  of  onyx. 
But  there  is  much  also  which  is  no  more  than  a  graceful  trifling, 
the  verse  of  a  courtly  gentleman,  who,  as  he  grows  older, 
takes  more  and  more  assiduous  pains  in  the  shaping  and  polish- 
ing of  compliments.  It  is  at  its  best  when  it  is  most  personal, 
and  no  one  has  written  more  nobly  of  himself,  more  calmly, 
with  a  more  lofty  tenderness  for  humanity  seen  in  one's  small, 
private  looking-glass.  But  the  whole  man  never  comes  alive 
into  the  verse,  body  and  soul,  but  only  as  a  stately  presence. 

He  has  put  more  of  himself  into  his  prose,  and  it  is  in  the 
prose  mainly  that  we  must  seek  the  individual  features  of 
his  soul  and  temperament.  Every  phrase  comes  to  us  with 
the  composure  and  solemnity  of  verse,  but  with  an  easier 
carriage  under  restraint.  And  now  he  is  talking,  with  what 
for  him  is  an  eagerness  and  straightforwardness  in  saying  what 
he  has  to  say, — the  'beautiful  thoughts'  never  'disdainful  of 


JAMES   SMITH   AND  HORATIO    SMITH        189 

sonorous  epithets.'  And  you  discover  that  he  has  much  more 
to  say  than  the  verse  has  quite  fully  hinted  at :  a  whole  new 
hemisphere  of  the  mind  becomes  visible,  completing  the 
sphere.  And  in  all  his  prose,  though  only  in  part  of  his  verse, 
he  has  the  qualities  which  he  attributes  to  Pindar:  'rejection 
of  what  is  light  and  minute,  disdain  of  what  is  trivial,  and  se- 
lection of  those  blocks  from  the  quarry  which  will  bear  strong 
strokes  of  the  hammer  and  retain  all  the  marks  of  the  chisel.' 
He  wrote  far  more  prose  than  verse,  concentrating  his  ma- 
turest  years  upon  the  writing  of  prose.  Was  it,  then,  that  his 
genius  was  essentially  a  prose  genius,  and  that  it  was  only 
when  he  turned  to  prose  that,  in  the  fullest  sense,  he  found 
himself?  I  do  not  think  it  can  be  said  that  the  few  finest 
things  in  Landor's  verse  are  excelled  by  the  best  of  the  many 
fine  things  in  his  prose;  but  the  level  is  higher.  His  genius 
was  essentially  that  of  the  poet,  and  it  is  to  this  quality  that 
he  owes  the  greater  among  the  excellences  of  his  prose.  In  the 
expression  of  his  genius  he  was  ambidextrous,  but  neither  in 
prose  nor  in  verse  was  he  able  to  create  life  in  his  own  image. 
No  one  in  prose  or  in  verse  has  written  more  finely  about 
things ;  but  he  writes  about  them,  he  does  not  write  them. 

JAMES    SMITH    (1775-1839)    AND    HORATIO    SMITH 

(1779-1849) J 

James  and  Horatio  Smith  were  collaborators  in  one  of  the 
most  perfect  collections  of  parodies  that  exist,  the  'Re- 
jected Addresses/  published  in  1812,  in  answer  to  a  public 
appeal  from  the  manager  of  Drury  Lane  Theatre  for  'an 
Address  to  be  spoken  upon  the  opening  of  the  Theatre,'  after 
its  rebuilding.     The  volume  contained  twenty-one  parodies 

1  (1)  Rejected  Addresses,  1812.  (2)  Horace  in  London,  1813.  (3)  Ama- 
rynthus,  the  Nympholept  (by  Horace),  1821.  (4)  Gaieties  and  Gravities, 
2  vols.,  1825.  (5)  Memoirs,  Letters,  and  Comic  Miscellanies,  in  Prose  and 
Verse,  of  the  late  James  Smith,  edited  by  his  br  other  Horace  Smith, 
2  vols.,  1840.    (6)  Poetical  Works  of  Horace,  2  vols.,  1846. 


190    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

of  living  poets,  done  with  equal  skill,  wit,  and  ingenuity 
by  the  two  brothers.  The  success  was  immediate,  and,  for 
such  a  book,  enormous,  and  very  little  of  its  savour  has  gone 
out  of  it  after  a  century.  Some  of  the  parodies  which  must 
have  been  among  the  most  amusing  at  a  time  when  the  Hon. 
William  Spencer  was  commonly  confused  with  an  older  poet 
of  similar  name,  can  scarcely  appeal  to  us  as  they  did  to  those 
familiar  with  the  verses  parodied.  But  the  Wordsworth,  the 
Coleridge,  the  Scott  ('I  certainly  must  have  written  this  my- 
self said  'that  fine-tempered  man'  to  one  of  the  authors), 
the  Southey,  all  these  remain  a  perpetual  delight,  unsurpassed 
by  any  later  parodist.  The  words  of  Shelley,  used  of  one, 
might  well  be  applied  to  both,  who,  if  they  laughed  inordi- 
nately, laughed  without  'a  sting  in  the  tail  of  the  honey.' 
Here  is  Shelley's  summing  up  in  verse :  — 

'  Wit  and  sense, 
Virtue  and  human  knowledge ;  all  that  might 
Make  the  dull  world  a  business  of  delight, 
Are  all  combined  in  Horace  Smith.' 

And  in  talk  he  defined  him  as  one  who  'writes  poetry  and 
pastoral  drama,  and  yet  knows  how  to  make  money,  and 
does  make  it,  and  is  still  generous.'  The  pastoral  drama 
meant  'Amarynthus,  the  Nympholept,'  which  he  published 
anonymously  in  1821,  in  a  little  book  containing,  among  some 
sonnets,  one  to  Shelley,  '  bold  herald  of  announcements  high.' 
The  play  overflows  with  fancy :  — 

'For  now  the  clouds,  in  tufts  of  fleecy  hue, 
Wander,  like  flocks  of  sheep,  through  fields  of  blue, 
Cropping  the  stars  for  daisies,  while  the  moon 
Sits  smiling  on  them  as  a  shepherdess ' ; 


and 


'  The  Spring  time  gushes 
For  us  as  in  the  lusty  grass  and  bushes,' 


says  or  sings  Amarynthus,  who  for  some  reason  hears  rills 
or  streams  in  the  strange  and  six-times  repeated  act  of  '  gug- 


THOMAS  CAMPBELL  191 

gling.'  For  its  sylvan  gaiety,  'bathing  in  leafy  greenness/ 
and  full  of  the  sap  and  savour  of  'the  jolly  Spring,'  this 
pastoral  deserves  a  place,  somewhere  half-hidden,  between 
Leigh  Hunt  and  Keats.  It  has  more  sincerity  than  the  one 
and  less  rich  ardour  than  the  other,  but  it  shows  us  the  ap- 
proved wit  in  a  new  and  not  less  delightful  aspect.  Some  of 
the  poems  in  his  collected  '  Poetical  Works '  are  remarkable 
in  other  ways,  sometimes  lightly  humorous,  sometimes  full 
of  strange  meditation,  like  the  'Address  to  a  Mummy,'  some- 
times, as  in  'The  Murderer's  Confession,'  as  grotesquely  hor- 
rible as  Hood. 


THOMAS    CAMPBELL    (1775-1844) 1 

Campbell  shares  with  Longfellow  the  position  of  the  favour- 
ite poet  in  elementary  schools,  where  verse  is  learnt  by  heart 
as  an  exercise.  There  his  good  poems  and  his  bad  poems  are 
equally  appreciated:  'Lord  Ullin's  Daughter'  neither  more 
nor  less  than  ' Hohenlinden,'  and  'The  Harper'  than  the 
'Battle  of  the  Baltic'  In  his  own  lifetime  Byron  could  say, 
meaning  what  he  said:  'We  are  all  wrong  except  Rogers, 
Crabbe,  and  Campbell.'  It  could  be  said,  without  apparent 
extravagance,  by  Campbell's  not  too  considerate  biographer, 
Cyrus  Redding,  that  one  of  his  long  poems, '  Gertrude  of  Wyo- 
ming," combines  in  itself  the  best  characteristics  of  the  classic 
and  romantic  styles,  in  that  just  medium  which  forms  the 
truest  principle  for  modern  poetry ' ;  and  of  the  other  equally 
famous  long  poem,  '  The  Pleasures  of  Hope,'  that  it  belonged 
to  'that  species  of  poetical  composition  which  can  alone  be 
expected  to  attain  in  the  eyes  of  true  taste  a  classical  and 
healthy  longevity.'  He  was  blamed  for  his  too  conscious  and 

1  (1)  The  Pleasures  of  Hope,  1799.  (2)  Gertrude  of  Wyoming,  1809. 
(3)  O'Connor's  Child,  1810.  (4)  Theodoric,  1824.  (5)  Miscellaneous 
Poems,  1824.    (6)  The  Pilgrim  of  Glencoe,  1842. 


192     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IX  EXGLISH  POETRY 

too  deliberate  art,  for  'the  smell  of  the  lamp*  which  clung 
about  his  verse.  To-day  his  audience  is  found  on  the  lower 
benches  of  day-schools;  that  audience  has  been  faithful  to 
him  for  at  least  two  generations ;  but  it  has  never  heard  of 
'Gertrude  of  Wyoming'  or  of  'The  Pleasures  of  Hope.'  in 
which  Campbell's  contemporaries  saw  'intimations'  for  him 
'of  immortality.' 

The  problem  is  curious.,  and  there  are  complications  in  it ; 
for.  while  all  the  bookish  and  ambitious  verse  has  been  for- 
gotten, some  of  the  simple  verse  which  has  remained  popular 
is  not  less  worthless,  while  some  of  it,  a  very  little,  has  quali- 
ties more  or  less  unique  in  English  poetry.  How  are  we  to 
explain  these  compromises  and  caprices  of  posterity? 

Campbell  lived  his  whole  life  at  a  great  distance  from  reality, 
always  believing  what  he  wanted  to  believe  and  denying  what 
he  did  not  want  to  believe.  He  was  not  a  dreamer  who  could 
transpose  the  worlds  and  be  content  in  either;  he  was  fitful, 
essentially  unreal,  a  faint-hearted  evader  of  reality.  In  a  con- 
versation which  might  have  come  direct  out  of  'The  Egoist,' 
he  is  seen  defending  Mrs.  Siddons  against  a  criticism  whose 
justice  he  does  not  actually  dispute,  by  saying  pettishly:  'I 
won't  admit  her  want  of  excellence  in  anything.  She  is  an  old 
friend  of  mine.'  Himself  a  persistent  critic  of  his  own  work, 
he  forgave  no  other  critic,  and  refused  to  correct  an  error 
which  had  been  discovered  by  any  one  but  himself.  He  de- 
spised his  own  ' Hohenlinden/  which  he  called  a  'damned 
drum  and  trumpet  thing,'  and  only  printed  to  please  Scott. 
The  famous  false  rhyme  in  the  last  stanza  —  'sepulchre'  for 
what  should  be  sounded  'sepulchry'  — he  neither  admitted 
nor  denied,  neither  blamed  nor  defended.  We  see  him  wonder- 
ing whether  such  a  word  as '  sepulchry '  ever  existed,  half  wish- 
ing that  it  did,  yet  refusing  to  adopt  it,  and  concluding  weakly 
that  the  word  as  it  is  'reads  well  alone,  if  we  forget  that  there 
should  be  a  concinnity  with  the  preceding  lines.'  He  was 
fastidious  without  taste,  full  of  alarmed  susceptibility ;  so  that 


THOMAS  CAMPBELL  193 

when  he  was  editing  Colburn's  '  New  Monthly '  he  disliked  his 
best  contributor,  the  one  who  brought  him  most  that  was  new, 
Hazlitt,  and  was  with  difficulty  persuaded  to  accept  the 
epical  essay  on  the  prize-fight. 

The  truth  is  that  Campbell  was  a  sentimental  egoist,  the 
Sir  Willoughby  Patterne  of  poets.  His  incapability  of  realising 
things  as  they  are,  until  the  realisation  was  forced  upon  him 
by  some  crisis,  explains  that  unreality,  that  vague  rosy  tinge, 
which  we  find  in  almost  all  of  his  poetry  which  professes  to 
deal  with  actual  life.  In  life,  as  in  poetry,  the  real  force  of 
things  was  not  to  be  wholly  evaded.  There  is  a  story  told  of 
how  a  stranger  repeated  to  him  the  words  of  an  old  Welsh 
bard: ' My  wife  is  dead,  my  son  is  mad,  my  harp  is  unstrung,' 
and  how  Campbell  burst  into  tears,  for  the  burden  of  the  triad 
might  have  been  his  own.  These  profound  distresses,  it  is  true, 
he  never  met  fairly.  He  tried  to  forget  them,  in  what  his 
biographers  call '  convivial  company,'  in  change  of  abode,  even 
in  unnecessary  hack-work.  He  regarded,  we  are  told,  'poetical 
composition  as  a  labour,'  and  the  inclination  fcr  it  'came  upon 
him  only  at  rare  intervals.'  It  may  be  that  'his  slowness  of 
composition  was,'  as  he  says  of  Carew,  'evidently  that  sort 
of  care  in  the  poet  which  saves  trouble  to  his  reader.'  But  not 
only  did  he  write  with  labour ;  poetry  was  never  to  him  a  means 
of  self-expression. 

It  was  the  age  when  poets  set  themselves  tasks  in  verse,  and 
to  Campbell  as  a  young  man  Rogers'  'Pleasures  of  Memory,' 
itself  descended  from  Akenside's  'Pleasures  of  Imagination,! 
presented  itself  as  a  model  of  what  should  be  attempted.  He 
found  it  easy,  in '  The  Pleasures  of  Hope,'  to  surpass  his  models, 
but,  though  one  of  its  lines  is  continually  on  our  lips  to-day, 

'  'T  is  distance  lends  enchantment  to  the  view,' 

the  smooth  meandering  of  verse,  with  its  Micawber-like  cheer- 
fulness, becomes  drearier  and  more  dismal  as  we  read;  and 
when  we  have  reached 


194     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'Come,  bright  Improvement,  on  the  car  of  Time, 
And  rule  the  spacious  world  from  clime  to  clime,' 

we  begin  to  wonder  by  what  cottage-side  poetry  has  gone  to 
live  in  the  land.  With  Wordsworth,  perhaps,  whose  'Lyrical 
Ballads '  have  just  been  published,  to  the  derision  of  a  polite 
public  which  applauds  'The  Pleasures  of  Hope! ' 

Tastes  change,  they  say,  and  tastes  do  change,  though  taste 
does  not.  But  there  is  one  touchstone  which  may  be  applied, 
apart  from  all  technical  qualities,  all  rules  of  metre  or  fashions 
of  speech,  whenever  verse  has  a  plain  thing  to  say.  The  verse 
which  takes  what  has  already  been  finely  and  adequately 
said  in  prose,  and  makes  of  it  something  inferior  in  mere  direct- 
ness and  expressiveness  of  statement,  cannot  be  good  verse. 
This  is  what  Campbell  found  in  the  Bible : '  And  the  king  was 
much  moved,  and  went  up  to  the  chamber  over  the  gate,  and 
wept :  and  as  he  went,  thus  he  said :  "  O  my  son  Absalom,  my 
son,  my  son  Absalom !  would  God  I  had  died  for  thee,  O  Ab- 
salom, my  son,  my  son! "  '  And  this  is  what  Campbell  made 
of  it  in  '  The  Pleasures  of  Hope  ■  :  — 

'"  My  Absalom!"  the  voice  of  Nature  cried, 
"  O  that  for  thee  thy  father  could  have  died ! 
Fop  bloody  was  the  deed,  and  rashly  done, 
That  slew  my  Absalom !  —  my  son !  —  my  son !  "  ' 

In  this  poem  one  seems  to  catch  the  last  gasp  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century;  in  'Gertrude  of  Wyoming,'  published  ten 
years  later,  we  are  in  the  century  of  '  Childe  Harold '  and  the 
romantic  tales.  '  Gertrude '  is  a  tepid  romance,  such  as  school- 
girls may  dream  after  reading  books  of  improving  travel;  a 
thing  all  feminine  and  foppish,  written  by  the  man,  'dressed 
sprucely,'  whom  Byron  calls  up  for  us:  'A  blue  coat  becomes 
him — so  does  his  new  wig.'  The  blue  coat  and  the  new  wig 
are  never  far  away  from  these  Pennsylvanian  forests,  with 
their  panthers,  palm-trees,  and  flamingoes  of  the  tropics. 
Unreality  is  in  every  languid  line. 


THOMAS  CAMPBELL  195 

'  So  finished  he  the  rhyme  (howe'er  uncouth) 
That  true  to  nature's  fervid  feelings  ran 
(And  song  is  but  the  eloquence  of  truth) ' 

says  Campbell,  vaguely;  and  I  suppose  he  believed  himself  to 
have  been  '  true  to  nature's  fervid  feelings '  in  his  record  of 
the  respectable  loves  of  Gertrude  and  Waldegrave.  'Never 
insensible  to  female  beauty/  says  the  commentator,  Cyrus 
Redding,  'and  fond  of  the  society  of  women,  it  was  singular 
that  Campbell,  the  poet  of  sentiment  and  imagery,  should 
have  written  little  or  nothing  breathing  of  ardent  affection.' 
Campbell's  was,  in  his  own  affected  phrase, 

'  The  heart  that  vibrates  to  a  feeling  tone ' ; 

and  here  as  elsewhere  one  can  imagine  him  to  have  been 
genuinely  touched  by  what,  in  his  way  of  telling  it,  fails  to 
touch  us.  When  people  read  'Gertrude  of  Wyoming'  they 
had  acquired  a  taste  for  poetical  narratives;  since  Rousseau, 
the  virtues  of  forest  folk  were  esteemed;  and  the  poem,  no 
doubt,  responded  to  some  occasion  in  the  public  mind.  I  have 
tried  to  find  a  single  line  of  genuine  poetry  in  its  thin  trickle 
of  verse,  but  I  have  found  none.  There  is  in  it  a  little  more  of 
what  used  to  be  called  'fancy '  than  in  the  much  later,  wholly 
unsuccessful  '  Theodoric ' ;  but  it  is  not  appreciably  nearer  to 
poetry.  'The  pearly  dew  of  sensibility,'  which  Hazlitt  dis- 
covered in  its  recesses,  has  not,  as  he  thought  it  would,  '  dis- 
tilled and  collected,  like  the  diamond  in  the  mine ' ;  nor  does 
'the  structure  of  his  fame,'  according  to  the  singular  meta- 
phor, 'rest  on  the  crystal  columns  of  a  polished  imagination.' 
Yet  other  props  and  embellishments  must  be  knocked 
away  from  the  structure  of  Campbell's  fame  before  we  can 
distinguish  what  is  really  permanent  in  it.  There  is,  first  of  all, 
the  series  of  romantic  ballads.  In  'Lord  Ullin's  Daughter' 
and  the  rest  Campbell  writes  with  a  methodical  building  up 
of  circumstantial  emotion  which  in  the  end  becomes  ludicrous, 
from  its  'more  than  usual  order.'  Few  escape  absurdity,  but 


196     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

I  doubt  whether  any  parodist  has  ever  equalled  the  quite 
serious  conclusion  of  '  The  Ritter  Bann ' :  — 

'  Such  was  the  throb  and  mutual  sob 
Of  the  Knight  embracing  Jane.' 

Here  and  there,  in  a  homelier  story,  Campbell  seems  to  be  try- 
ing to  imitate  Wordsworth,  as  in  the  foolish  '  Child  and  Hind ' 
and  the  less  foolish  'Napoleon  and  the  British  Sailor';  and 
once,  in  '  The  Parrot  of  Mull :  a  Domestic  Anecdote,'  he  seems 
to  have  almost  caught  the  knack,  and  the  piece  might  take  its 
place,  not  unworthily,  among  Wordsworth's  second-rate  work 
in  that  kind. 

'  Another  sort  of  work  which  Campbell  attempted  with  much 
immediate  success,  and  for  which  he  is  still  remembered  in  the 
schoolroom,  is  a  kind  of  pathetic  ballad  which  appeals  almost 
indecently  to  the  emotions:  I  mean  such  pieces  as  'The  Exile 
of  Erin,'  'The  Harper,'  'The  Wounded  Hussar.'  There  is 
emotion  in  them,  but  the  emotion,  when  it  is  not  childish,  is 
genteel.  I  scarcely  know  whether  the  misfortunes  of  'poor 
dog  Tray '  or  of  the  'wounded  hussar '  are  to  be  taken  the  less 
seriously;  the  latter,  perhaps,  by  just  the  degree  in  which  it 
aims  at  a  more  serious  effect.  'And  dim  was  that  eye,  once 
expressively  beaming ' :  it  is  of  the  soldier  he  speaks,  not  of  the 
dog.  But  it  is  in  a  better  poem,  '  The  Exile  of  Erin,'  that  we 
see  most  clearly  the  difference  and  the  cause  of  the  difference 
between  Campbell's  failures  and  successes  in  precisely  what  he 
could  do  bestjn  the  expression  of  patriotic  feeling*  'The 
Exile  of  Erin '  is  one  of  those  many  poems,  written,  often,  by 
men  who  would  have  died  for  the  convictions  expressed  in 
them,  but  written  with  so  hackneyed  and  commonplace  a 
putting  of  that  passion  into  words  that  the  thing  comes  to  us 
lifeless,  and  stirs  in  us  no  more  of  a  thrill  than  the  casual  street- 
singer's  '  Home,  Sweet  Home,'  drawled  out  for  pence  and  a 
supper. 

Conviction,  it  should  always  be  remembered,  personal  sin- 


THOMAS  CAMPBELL  197 

cerity,  though  it  is  an  important  ingredient  in  the  making  of 
a  patriotic  or  national  poem,  is  but  one  ingredient  among 
many ;  and  there  is  one  of  these  which  is  even  more  important : 
poetical  impulse,  which  is  a  very  different  thing  from  personal 
impulse.  I  have  no  doubt  that  the  personal  impulse  of  'The 
Exile  of  Erin '  was  at  least  as  sincere  as  that  of '  Hohenlinden ' ; 
I  should  say  it  was  probably  much  more  deeply  felt ;  but  here 
the  poetical  energy  lags  behind  the  energy  of  conviction ;  the 
effort  to  be  patriotic  and  to  draw  an  affecting  moral  is  undis- 
guised ;  the  result  is  a  piece  of  artistic  insincerity.  In  '  Hohen- 
linden' some  wandering  spark  has  alighted;  the  wind  has 
carried  it,  and  one  knows  not  from  whence;  only,  a  whole 
beacon  is  ablaze. 

'  Hohenlinden '  is  a  poem  made  wholly  out  of  very  obvious 
materials,  and  made  within  very  narrow  limits,  to  which  it 
owes  its  intensity.  Campbell  had  precisely  that  mastery  of  the 
obvious  which  makes  rememberable  lines,  such  as  'Distance 
lends  enchantment  to  the  view,'  or  '  Coming  events  cast  their 
shadows  before,'  which  we  remember  as  we  remember  truisms, 
almost  ashamed  at  doing  so.  They  contain  no  poetic  sugges- 
tion, they  are  no  vital  form  of  poetic  speech ;  but  they  make 
statements  to  which  verse  lends  a  certain  emphasis  by  its  limit- 
ing form  or  enclosure.  Very  often  Campbell  uses  this  steady 
emphasis  when  no  emphasis  is  needed,  as  in  this  kind  of  verse, 
for  instance :  — 

'I  mark  his  proud  but  ravaged  form, 
As  stern  he  wraps  his  mantle  round, 
And  bids,  on  winter's  bleakest  ground, 
Defiance  to  the  storm.' 

This  is  merely  meant  for  the  picture  of  the  friendless  man,  not 
a  jjyronic  Corsair;  and  here  the  emphasis  is  above  all  a  defect 
of  the  visual  sense :  he  cannot  see  simply  with  the  mind's  eye. 
In  such  poems  as  the  powerful  and  unpoetical  '  Last  Man ' 
the  emphasis  is  like  a  conscious  rigidity  of  bearing  on  parade, 
a  military  earnestness  of  rhetoric.  The  lines  march  with  feet 


198     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

keeping  time  with  the  drill-master ;  and  the  wonder  and  terror 
which  should  shake  in  the  heart  of  the  poem  are  frozen  at  the 
source.  In  the  genuine  success  of  '  Hohenlinden '  every  line 
is  a  separate  emphasis,  but  all  the  emphasis  is  required  by  the 
subject,  is  in  its  place.  The  thud  and  brief  repeated  monotony 
of  the  metre  give  the  very  sound  of  cannonading;  each  line 
is  like  a  crackle  of  musketry.  What  is  obvious  in  it,  even, 
comes  well  into  a  poem  which  depends  on  elements  so  simple 
for  its  success;  indeed,  its  existence. 

The  one  fixed  passion  in  Campbell's  shifting  soul  seems  to 
have  been  the  passion  for  liberty.  The  dust  from  Kosciusko's 
grave,  cast  by  a  Polish  patriot  into  the  grave  of  Campbell  in 
Westminster  Abbey,  was  a  last  appropriate  homage  to  one  who 
had  always  been  'the  sanguine  friend  of  freedom.'  He  was 
the  patriot  of  all  oppressed  countries,  and  his  love  for  his  own 
country  was  only  part  of  that  wider  human  enthusiasm.  His 
love  of  England  was  quickened,  or  brought  to  poetic  heat,  by 
a  love  of  the  sea,  and  by  a  curiously  vivid  appreciation  of  the 
life  and  beauty  of  warships.  In  his  controversy  with  Bowles, 
as  to  the  place  of  nature  and  of  art  in  poetry,  his  most  effec- 
tive argument  was  drawn  from  a  warship.  '  Those  who  have 
ever  witnessed  the  spectacle  of  the  launching  of  a  ship  of  the 
line  will  perhaps  forgive  me  for  adding  this  to  the  examples 
of  the  sublime  objects  of  artificial  life.  Of  that  spectacle  I 
can  never  forget  the  impression,  and  of  having  witnessed  it 
reflected  from  the  faces  of  ten  thousand  spectators.  ...  It 
was  not  a  vulgar  joy,  but  an  affecting  national  solemnity.' 
Something  of  this  'mental  transport,'  as  he  elsewhere  de- 
scribes it,  this  sense  of  the  beauty  and  grandeur  of  the  actual 
circumstances  of  sea-fighting,  came,  along  with  the  patriotic 
fervour,  into  his  two  naval  odes,  '  Ye  Mariners  of  England ' 
and  'The  Battle  of  the  Baltic,'  his  two  really  great  poems. 

'  Ye  Mariners  of  England '  has  a  finer  poetic  substance  than 
'  Hohenlinden '  and  a  more  original  metrical  scheme,  here,  as 
there,  curiously  well  adapted  to  its  subject.  The  heavy  pauses 


THOMAS  CAMPBELL  199 

and  loud  rushes:  'And  sweep  through  the  deep/  with  its 
checked  flow  and  onset;  'When  the  stormy  winds  do  blow/ 
twice  repeated,  with  a  vehement  motion,  and  an  exultation  as 
of  wind  and  water :  conscious  art  has  here,  for  once,  caught 
hands  with  a  fiercer  impulse,  and  wrought  better  than  it  knew. 
Even  here,  however,  the  impulse  is  on  the  wane  before  the 
last  stanza  is  over;  and  that  last  stanza  has  been  made  for 
logic's  sake  rather  than  for  any  more  intimate  need. 

And  even  in  'The  Battle  of  the  Baltic/  where  Campbell 
reaches  his  highest  height,  there  are  flaws,  weaknesses,  trifling 
perhaps,  but  evident  here  and  there ;  touches  of  false  poetising, 
like  the  line  in  the  last  stanza:  'And  the  mermaid's  song  con- 
doles.' But  the  manliness,  haughty  solemnity,  the  blithe  cour- 
age and  confidence  of  the  poem,  and  also  the  invention  of  the 
metre  (an  afterthought,  as  we  know,  introduced  when  the 
poem  was  cut  down  from  twenty-seven  stanzas  of  six  lines 
each  into  eight  stanzas  of  nine)  are  things  unique  in  English. 
The  structure,  with  its  long  line  moving  slowly  to  the  pause, 
at  which  the  three  heavily  weighted,  yet,  as  it  were,  proudly 
prancing  syllables  fall  over  and  are  matched  by  the  three 
syllables  which  make  the  last  line,  the  whole  rhythmical 
scheme,  unlike  anything  that  had  been  done  before,  has  left 
its  mark  upon  whatever  in  that  line  has  been  done  finely  since : 
upon  Browning  in  '  Herve  Riel/  upon  Tennyson  in  '  The  Re- 
venge.' And  if  any  one  thinks  that  this  kind  of  masterpiece 
is  hardly  more  than  the  natural  outcome  of  a  fervid  patriotic 
impulse,  let  him  turn  to  others  of  Campbell's  poems  full  of 
an  even  lustier  spirit  of  patriotism,  to  poems  as  bad  as  the 
'Stanzas  on  the  Threatened  Invasion/  1803,  or  as  compara- 
tively good  as  '  Men  of  England/  and  he  will  see  just  how  far 
the  personal  impulse  will  carry  a  poet  of  uncertain  technique 
in  the  absence  of  adequate  poetic  impulse  and  adequate  poetic 
technique. 

In  much  of  Campbell's  work  there  is  a  kind  of  shallow  ele- 
gance, a  turn  of  phrase  which  is  neat,  but  hardly  worth  doing 


200     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

at  all  if  it  is  done  no  better.  Read  the  little  complimentary 
verses  to  ladies,  and  think  of  Lovelace;  read  'The  Beech- 
Tree's  Petition,'  with  its  nice  feeling  and  words  without  atmos- 
phere, and  think  of  Marvell's  garden-verses,  in  which  every 
line  has  perfume  and  radiance.  The  work  is  so  neat,  so  rounded 
and  polished ;  like  waxen  flowers  under  glass  shades ;  no  nearer 
to  nature  or  art. 

In  the  'Valedictory  Stanzas  to  Kemble'  there  is  a  definition 
of  'taste,'  which  shows  us  something  of  Campbell's  theory  and 
aim  in  art :  — 

'  Taste,  like  the  silent  dial's  power, 

That,  when  supernal  light  is  given, 
Can  measure  inspiration's  hour, 
And  tell  its  height  in  heaven.' 

And  he  defines  the  mind  of  the  actor  as  '  at  once  ennobled  and 
correct.'  Always  labouring  to  be  'at  once  ennobled  and  cor- 
rect,' Campbell  is  never  visited  by  any  poetic  inspiration, 
except  in  those  few  poems  in  which  he  has  not  been  more  sin- 
cere, or  chosen  better,  than  usual,  but  has  been  more  lucky, 
and  able  to  carry  an  uncertain  technique  further.  That,  and 
not  emotion,  or  sincerity,  or  anything  else,  is  what  distinguishes 
what  is  good  from  what  is  bad  in  his  work,  even  in  those  poems 
which  have  given  our  literature  its  greatest  war-songs. 


THOMAS  MOORE   (1779-1852)  1 

Moore  as  a  poet  is  the  Irishman  as  the  Englishman  imagines 
him  to  be,  and  he  represents  a  part  of  the  Irish  temperament ; 

1  (1)  Odes  from  Anacreon,  1800.  (2)  The  Poetical  Works  of  the  Late 
Thomas  Little,  1801.  (3)  Epistles,  Odes,  and  other  Poems,  1806.  (4)  Irish 
Melodies,  with  Music  by  Sir  James  Stevenson,  i,  1807;  ii,  1807;  iii,  1810; 
iv,  1811;  v,  1813;  vi,  1815;  vii,  1818;  viii,  1821;  ix,  1824;  x,  1834.  (5) 
Corruption  and  Intolerance,  1808.  (6)  The  Sceptic.  (7)  Intercepted  Letters, 
or  The  Two-penny  Post  Bag,  1813.  (8)  Sacred  Songs,  1816,  1824.  (9) 
Lalla  Rookh,  1817.    (10)  National  Airs,  1818,  1826.    (11)  The  Fudge 


THOMAS  MOORE  201 

but  not  the  part  which  makes  for  poetry.  All  the  Irish  quick- 
silver is  in  him;  he  registers  change  with  every  shift  in  the 
weather.  He  has  the  spirits  of  a  Dublin  mob;  and  it  is  the 
voice  of  the  mob,  prettily  refined,  sweetened,  set  to  a  tune, 
which  we  hear  in  his  songs.  But  the  voice  of  the  peasant  is 
not  in  him ;  there  is  in  him  nothing  of  that  uneasy,  listening 
conscience  which  watches  the  earth  for  signs,  and  is  never 
alone  in  solitude.  He  is  without  imagination,  and  his  fun  and 
his  fancy  are  but  the  rising  and  sinking  of  the  quicksilver,  and 
mean  no  more  than  a  change  in  the  weather.  The  imagination, 
which  made  the  great  Irish  legends,  is  still  awake  in  the  pea- 
sant; education  has  not  yet  robbed  him  of  the  best  part  of 
his  birthright;  and  in  Mr.  Yeats,  and  in  A.  E.,  and  in  Dr. 
Douglas  Hyde,  we  see  the  Irish  imagination  again  creating 
nobly  after  its  kind.  Moore  prattled  of  'the  harp  that  once 
through  Tara's  halls  the  soul  of  music  shed';  but  the  harp 
to  which  his  ears  really  listened  was  modern  and  gilded,  and 
played  by  a  young  lady  in  a  drawing-room.  He  sang  to  it 
with  an  agreeable  voice,  and  he  delighted  his  contemporaries. 
In  considering  the  question  of  any  individual  popularity,  it 
is  needful,  I  think,  to  take  into  account  the  general  level  of 
taste  which  can  be  distinguished  in  the  public  which  has 
created  that  popularity.  Sophocles  was  popular  in  his  time, 
and  if  we  scrutinise  all  that  is  known  of  the  Athenian  public 
which  appreciated  his  plays,  we  shall  see  that  the  general 
level  of  that  public's  taste  was  very  high,  and  we  shall  not 
be  surprised  by  the  popularity  of  so  great  a  poet  and  so  severe 
an  artist.  The  public  which  delighted  in  Shakespeare  was  the 
public  which  had  a  more  vivid  appreciation  of  strange  and 

Family  in  Paris,  1818.  (12)  The  Loves  of  the  Angels,  1823.  (13)  Fables 
for  the  Holy  Alliance,  1823.  (14)  Evenings  in  Greece,  1826,  1832.  (15) 
Odes  upon  Cash,  Corn,  Catholics,  and  other  Matters,  1828.  (16)  Legend- 
ary Ballads,  1828.  (17)  The  Summer  Fete,  1831.  (18)  Vocal  Minstrelsy, 
1834,  1835.  (19)  The  Fudges  in  England,  1835.  (20)  Alciphron  (added 
to  a  new  edition  of  The  European,  a  prose  romance),  1839.  (21)  Poetical 
Works,  10  vols.,  1840-41. 


202     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

stirring  things,  a  more  lively  sense  of  personal  adventure,  and 
a  more  friendly  and  intimate  love  and  cultivation  of  music, 
than  the  public  of  any  other  century  in  England.  What,  then, 
was  the  general  level  of  taste  in  art  at  the  time  when  Thomas 
Moore  was  (in  the  words  of  Byron's  dedication  of  'The  Cor- 
sair') 'the  poet  of  all  circles  and  the  idol  of  his  own'  ?  Blake 
was  living,  and,  when  known,  known  only  to  be  mocked, 
when  Moore's  career  as  a  poet  was  practically  over;  the  'Lyri- 
cal Ballads '  appeared  two  years  before  the  '  Odes  of  Anacreon ' 
and  three  years  before  the '  Poetical  Works  of  the  Late  Thomas 
Little,  Esq.,'  and  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  were  probably 
little  more  than  uncouth  names,  just  known  enough  to  be 
scorned,  to  the  'princely'  circles  in  which  Moore  was  an  idol 
and  the  world-wide  circles  of  whom  he  was  the  poet ;  Keats  and 
Shelley,  both  younger  men,  died  thirty  years  before  Moore, 
and  we  find  Shelley  in  the  year  of  his  death,  speaking  of 
'  Hellas '  (he  might  have  spoken  for  '  Lamia '  as  well)  as '  the 
last  of  my  orphans,'  and  asking  a  friend  if  it  was  he  who  was 
'introducing  it  to  oblivion,  and  me  to  my  accustomed  failure.' 
Scott,  an  older  man,  and  Byron,  a  younger  man,  were  Moore's 
only  serious  rivals  in  the  affection  of  the  public;  and  Byron 
was  loved  more  for  his  defects  than  for  his  qualities,  and  Scott, 
as  a  poet,  was  scarcely  less  overrated  than  Moore.  What, 
then,  can  be  said  of  the  general  level  of  taste  of  the  public 
which  Moore  intoxicated?  Can  we  argue  from  what  we  know 
of  it  that  Moore's  popularity  was  greatly  to  his  credit? 

'It  is  Moore's  great  distinction,'  we  are  told  by  his  bio- 
grapher, '  that  he  gave  real  pleasure  to  all  sorts  and  conditions 
of  men.'  That  is  true,  and  it  gave  to  his  fame  a  pleasant  fla- 
vour:  'my  friendly  fame,'  he  calls  it.  He  pleased  by  his  songs 
and  by  his  singing  of  them :  how  is  it  that  the  songs  to-day 
seem  to  us  like  last  season's  fashions,  melancholy  in  their 
faded  prettiness?  He  gave  pleasure,  but  the  quality  of  that 
pleasure  must  be  considered,  and  it  will  be  seen  that  it  was  not 
the  quality  of  poetic  pleasure. 


THOMAS  MOORE  203 

Moore,  it  may  be  said,  wrote  to  please,  not  out  of  any  deep 
inner  need ;  yet,  if  he  wrote  what  pleased  others,  it  was  mainly 
because  it  had  pleased  himself.  No ;  what  is  poetry  can  be  dis- 
tinguished from  what  is  not  poetry  by  none  of  these  tests, 
which  are  tests  of  probability,  at  the  utmost;  it  can  be  dis- 
tinguished only  by  the  presence  or  absence  in  it  of  the  qualities 
common  to  all  genuine  poetry:  some  quality  of  strangeness 
in  its  beauty,  some  gravity  or  gaiety  beyond  the  mere  sound 
or  message  of  its  words  in  the  ear,  and,  in  its  sincerity  to  a 
mood,  an  emotion,  or  a  sensation, 

'One  grace,  one  thought,  one  wonder,  at  the  least, 
Which  into  words  no  virtue  can  digest.' 

Herrick  wrote  drinking  songs,  and  he  left  in  them  some  of  the 
mournful  ecstasy  of  the  vine.  But,  in  the  drinking  songs  of 
Tom  Moore,  only  the  lees  are  left. 

In  the  preface  to  his  early  poems  we  find  Moore  wishing  him- 
self Catullus.  But  did  he  ever  quite  realise  what  was  said  in 
that  naked  speech,  that  word  like  a  flame  of  live  coal,  of  the 
great  lover  and  the  great  hater?  It  does  not  seem  so,  for  he 
praises  him  for  his  'exquisite  playfulness,'  his  'warm  yet 
chastened  description.'  Even  in  Rochester  and  Sedley,  whom 
he  professes  to  have  learnt  from,  he  sees  only  the  'graceful 
levity,'  and  this  as  a  mere  'dissipation  of  the  heart,'  set  off 
by  'those  seductive  graces  by  which  gallantry  almost  teaches 
it  to  be  amiable.'  What  counts  in  Rochester  is  not  that,  but 
the  sting;  and  the  sting  comes  from  some  quintessential  ex- 
pression of  a  nature  which  at  least  paid  the  price  of  sincerity. 
Do  Mr.  Thomas  Little's  'ten  or  twenty  kisses,'  however 
counted  or  however  multiplied,  fill  up  the  millionth  interval 
of  Rochester's  '  live-long  minute '  of  fidelity,  or  even  Sedley's 
regret  that  he  cannot  '  change  each  hour '  ? 

It  is  to  the  Cavalier  Lyrics,  no  doubt,  that  Moore  at  his  best 
comes  nearest ;  never  within  recognisable  distance  of  any  Eliza- 
bethan work,  and  never  near  enough  to  the  good  work  of  the 


204    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Restoration  for  the  comparison  to  be  seriously  made.  He  has 
their  fluency,  but  none  of  their  gentlemanly  restraint ;  touches 
of  their  crudity,  but  none  of  their  straightforwardness ;  and  of 
their  fine  taste,  nothing,  and  nothing  of  the  quality  of  mind 
which  lurks  under  all  their  disguises.  In  Moore's  songs  there 
is  no  '  fundamental  brain-work ' ;  they  have  no  base  in  serious 
idea  or  in  fine  emotion.  The  sensations  they  render  are  trivial 
in  themselves,  or  become  so  in  the  rendering;  there  is  a  con- 
tinual effervescence,  but  no  meditation  and  no  ecstasy.  Be- 
tween this  faint  local  heat  of  the  senses  and  the  true  lyric  rap- 
ture there  is  a  great  gulf.  Moore  brims  over  with  feeling,  and 
his  feeling  is  quick,  honest,  and  generous.  But  he  never  broods 
over  his  feeling  until  he  has  found  his  way  down  to  its  roots : 
the  song  strikes  off  from  the  surface  like  the  spurt  of  a  match ; 
there  is  no  deep  fire  or  steady  flame.  He  never  realised  the 
dignity  of  song  or  of  the  passions.  In  his  verse  he  was  amor- 
ous, but  a  foolish  lover;  shrewd,  but  without  wisdom;  honest, 
but  without  nobility;  a  breeder  of  easy  tears  and  quick  laugh- 
ter. He  sang  for  his  evening,  not  his  day;  and  he  had  his  re- 
ward, but  must  go  without  the  day's  wages. 

In  his  '  Book  of  Irish  Verse,'  Mr.  Yeats  has  made  a  cruel  and 
just  test  of  the  essential  quality  of  Moore's  lyrical  work  by 
printing,  one  after  the  other,  a  song  of  Moore :  — 

'  You  who  would  try 
The  terrible  track'; 

Th6ophile  Gautier's  close  and  heightened  translation :  — 

'  Vous  qui  voulez  courir 
La  terrible  carriere ' ; 

and  Mr.  Robert  Bridges'  translation  back  into  English  from 

Gautier :  — 

1  O  youth  whose  hope  is  high, 
Who  dost  to  truth  aspire,' 

in  which,  as  he  rightly  says,  the  lines  are  at  last  lifted  '  into  the 
rapture  and  precision  of  poetry.'  A  similar  test  might  be  made 


THOMAS  MOORE  205 

by  looking  from  the  lines  of  Dante  which  Moore  paraphrases  in 
his  '  Dream  of  the  Two  Sisters '  to  the  tripping  triviality  of  his 
version.  Three  lines  will  sufficiently  show  the  havoc. 

'  Giovane  e  bella  in  sogno  mi  parea, 
Donna  vedere  andar  per  una  landa, 
Cogliendo  fiori;  e  cantando  dicea.' 

So  far  Dante :  this  is  what  Moore  thought  Dante  meant :  — 

'  Methought  at  that  sweet  hour 
A  nymph  came  o'er  the  lea, 
Who,  gath'ring  many  a  flow'r, 
Thus  said  and  sung  to  me.' 

But  if  these  comparisons  seem  too  lofty,  I  have  a  very  legiti- 
mate one  in  reserve,  and  I  am  not  sure  that  it  is  not  the  most 
convincing.  There  is  an  '  Irish  Melody '  of  Moore  which  be- 
gins:— 

'  Oh !  had  we  some  bright  little  isle  of  our  own, 
In  a  blue  summer  ocean,  far  off  and  alone, 
Where  a  leaf  never  dies  in  the  still  blooming  bowers, 
And  the  bee  banquets  on  through  a  whole  year  of  flowers.' 

The  idea  has  been  repeated  by  another  Irishman,  Mr.  Yeats, 
and  his  poem  begins :  — 

'  I  will  arise  and  go  now,  and  go  to  Innisfree, 
And  a  small  cabin  build  there,  of  clay  and  wattles  made ; 
Nine  bean-rows  will  I  have  there,  a  hive  for  the  honey-bee, 
And  live  alone  in  the  bee-loud  glade.' 

No  two  poems  could  be  more  exactly  comparable;  the  re- 
semblances are  as  striking  as  the  differences;  and  the  differ- 
ences might  teach  in  one  lesson  all  that  distinguishes  what  is 
poetry  from  what  is  not  poetry. 

And  further,  if  you  will  compare  the  versification  of  these 
two  poems,  or  indeed  any  other  poems  of  the  two  writers,  you 
will  see  how  cheap,  for  the  most  part,  were  Moore's  rhythmi- 
cal effects,  how  continually  he  sacrificed  the  accent  of  the 
sense  to  the  accent  of  the  rhythm,  and  how  little  he  made  even 
out  of  those  rhythms  which  he  is  believed  to  have  introduced 


206     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

into  English.  Those  who  still  claim  for  Moore  some  recognition 
as  a  poet  claim  it  mainly  on  account  of  his  skill  in  metre,  and 
on  account  of  his  tact  in  writing  words  for  singing.  With  a 
good  poet,  good  music  can  make  good  songs ;  with  a  bad  poet, 
the  best  of  all  music  cannot  do  as  much,  and  Moore,  in  putting 
words  to  his  'Irish  Melodies/  did  not  always  give  the  tunes  a 
chance.  We  are  told:  'He  based  his  work  upon  Irish  tunes, 
composed  in  the  primitive  manner,  before  poetry  was  divorced 
from  music.  One  may  say,  virtually,  that  in  fitting  words  to 
these  tunes  he  reproduced  in  English  the  rhythms  of  Irish 
folk-song.'  But  we  are  told  further,  and  then  the  case  is  al- 
tered: 'The  thing  was  not  done  completely:  for  instance,  in 
the  first  number  of  the  "  Melodies,"  the  song  "Erin,  the  smile 
and  the  tear  in  thine  eye,"  is  to  the  tune  of  "Eileen  Aroon," 
and  the  Irish  words  ...  do  not  correspond  in  metre  with 
Moore's.  He  has  varied  the  tune,  and  is  consequently  using  a 
different  stanza.'  If,  further,  one  may  judge  from  Dr.  Hyde's 
translations  in  his  beautiful  book,  'The  Love  Songs  of  Con- 
nacht,'  Moore  has  come  very  far  short  of  having  '  reproduced 
in  English  the  rhythms  of  Irish  folk-song.'  Certain  cadences 
he  has  caught,  like  that  cadence  of 

'At  the  mid  hour  of  night,  when  stars  are  weeping,  I  fly,' 

which  we  are  told  is  'a  metrical  effect  wholly  new  in  English.' 
To  have  introduced  a  new  cadence  into  English  is  quite  a 
creditable  thing  to  have  done,  even  without  writing  a  good 
poem  by  its  aid.  And,  though  the  poem  beginning  with  this 
line  may  be  'the  most  beautiful  lyric  that  Moore  ever  wrote,' 
I  do  not  think  it  can  be  accepted  as  really  a  good  poem. 
To  be  'exquisite,'  or  to  attain  'high  poetry,' requires  qualities 
which  Moore  never  possessed,  and  neither  in  this  nor  in  another 
popular  lyric,  '  The  Light  of  Other  Days,'  graceful  and  plain- 
tive as  they  are,  can  I  find  an  exception  to  those  qualities  of 
strictly  second-rate  skill  in  verse-writing  which  he  did  possess. 
I  find  in  both  poems  a  facility  which  carries  the  tune  and  the 


ROBERT  EYRES  LANDOR        207 

sense  smoothly  and  quickly  along;  a  prettiness,  alike  of  sen- 
timent and  form;  a  certain  elegance, yet  a  thin  elegance,  which 
covers  nothing  vital;  and  the  sincerity  of  a  superficial  emo- 
tion which  I  can  neither  respect  nor  share,  for  it  is  fancy  play- 
ing the  part  of  feeling. 

Moore's  trot,  gallop,  and  jingle  of  verse  has,  no  doubt,  its 
skill  and  its  merit ;  but  its  skill  is  not  seldom  that  of  the  circus- 
rider,  and  its  merit  no  more  than  to  have  gone  the  due  number 
of  times  round  the  ring  without  slackening  speed.  It  enter- 
tains the  most  legitimately  when  it  carries  mere  folly  on  its 
back.  But  Moore  had  ideals  and  ideas,  and  only  the  same 
trained  nag  to  carry  them.  'Almost  without  knowing  it/ 
says  his  biographer,  'he  wrote  primarily  for  his  own  country- 
men ' ;  and  it  was  to  his  countrymen  that  he  said : '  There  exists 
no  title  of  honour  or  distinction  to  which  I  could  attach  half 
so  much  value  as  that  of  being  called  your  poet,  —  the  poet 
of  the  people  of  Ireland.'  First,  and  for  long,  he  sang  his 
patriotism  to  the  strains  of  his  own  barrel-organ ;  and  makes 
pity  and  anger  jig  to  the  same  measures  as  '  endearing  young 
charms.'  Gradually  he  gave  up  writing  verse,  and  wrote  prose, 
controversial  prose,  and  was  looked  upon  as  'the  champion  of 
the  liberties  of  Ireland.'  It  is  significant  of  the  whole  man,  and 
of  how  small  a  segment  of  him  was  an  artist,  that  for  Moore 
to  become  really  serious  meant  giving  up  verse.  Only  in  prose 
could  he  conceive  of  people  being  quite  serious,  and  writing 
nobly. 


ROBERT  EYRES  LANDOR  (1781-1869) 1 

The  style  and  language  of  Robert  Landor's  plays  were  more 
interesting  and  original  than  the  matter  of  them.  In  the  pre- 
face to  '  The  Count  Arezzi '  he  says  that  '  it  was  written  de- 

1  (1)  The  Count  Arezzi,  1824.   (2)  The  Impious  Feast,  1828.   (3)  The 
Earl  of  Brecon,  Faith's  Fraud,  The  Ferryman,  1841. 


208    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

signedly  with  those  qualities  which  were  to  render  it  unfit 
for  representation.'    We  can  read  with  pleasure :  — 

'  Be  merry, 
Sing  like  some  April  cuckoo  all  day  long 
The  same  dull  note,  for  rustic  fools  to  mock  at  — 
Their  jest,  their  weariness.' 

More  clothed  speech  is  to  be  found  in :  — 

'  Five-hooped  stoops 
Are  empty  ere  they  well  have  laid  the  dust 
Of  such  fierce  dog-day  drouth  and  sultriness.' 

Here,  and  elsewhere,  too  careful  a  search  after  metaphor  and 
elaborate  speech  tends  to  absorb  the  emotion,  which  is  lofty, 
and  to  get  in  the  way  of  the  drama,  which  is  not  dramatic. 
In  a  narrative  poem,  'The  Impious  Feast,'  there  is  a  wild 
imaginative  extravagance,  and  the  experiment  is  not  un- 
successful of  'a  rhyme  occasionally  so  close  and  so  frequent 
as  to  rescue  the  stanza ;  or  it  may  be  rendered  so  lax  as  to 
have  all  the  freedom  of  blank  verse.'  But  it  is  in  his  prose 
that  Landor  excels,  in  '  The  Fawn  of  Sertorius '  and  especially 
in  'The  Fountain  of  Arethusa.'  That  fantastic  romance, 
written  to  personify  a  strange  philosophy,  is  the  invention  of  a 
moralist  and  a  poet.  The  style  has  something  of  the  purity 
of  his  brother's,  but  is  at  times  touched  with  eccentricity, 
in  its  expression  of  a  calm  persuasive  satire.  'Figures  of 
speech,  which  were  originally  intended  to  explain  our  reasons 
and  opinions,  like  unpractised  performers  in  a  new  dance, 
jostle  against  their  partners,  and  confuse  the  rest':  how  like 
Landor  that  is !  But  here  is  the  brother : '  Since  it  is  much  more 
pleasurable  to  carry  the  whip  in  your  hand  than  to  feel  it 
upon  your  shoulder,  who  would  not  be  a  critic  if  he  could,  as 
the  herring  would  be  a  shark,  the  rabbit  a  stoat,  and  the  oyster 
an  alderman? '  The  outlines  of  the  narrative  are  ingeniously 
contrived,  not  without  humour  in  its  picture  of  a  world  peo- 
pled by  dead  Romans  who  had  survived  death,  and  remained 


EBENEZER  ELLIOTT  209 

critics  of  the  living.  Their  arguments  against  a  conventional 
Christianity  are  uncommon  and  irrefutable;  against  these 
Britons,  who  'cannot  have  shown  so  much  courage  in  sub- 
duing the  world  as  in  defying  its  Creator.' 


EDWARD,  BARON  THURLOW  (1781-1S29)1 

One  of  Lord  Thurlow's  sonnets,  the  only  good  one,  is  known 
because  Lamb  praised  and  quoted  it  in  a  note  to  his  essay  on 
Sidney's  Sonnets  on  the  first  appearance  of  that  essay  in  the 
'London  Magazine.'  He  called  it  a  sonnet  which  'for  quiet 
sweetness  and  unaffected  morality  has  scarcely  its  parallel  in 
our  language.'  If  any  reader  goes  further,  and  turns  over  the 
chill  and  elegant  pages  where  there  are  other  sonnets,  ad- 
dressed to '  very  illustrious  noblemen,'  with  pastorals  done  after 
old  patterns,  and  Tasso  tepidly  imitated,  he  must  remember 
that  in  a  letter  to  Wordsworth  Lamb  himself  complained  of 
the  fatigue  of  '  going  through  a  volume  of  fine  words  by  Lord 
Thurlow,'  and  that  he  was  glad  to  turn  from  the  'excellent 
words'  to  Vincent  Bourne,  'his  diction  all  Latin  and  his 
thoughts  all  English.' 


EBENEZER  ELLIOTT  (1781-1849)* 

A  great  deal  too  much  space  in  the  collected  poems  of  Eben- 
ezer  Elliott  is  filled  with  a  series  of  rhymed  and  blank  verse 
narrative  and  'epical'  productions,  filled  with  fervid  talk, 
not  without  vigour  and  a  kind  of  rough  eloquence,  but  result- 

1  (1)  Verses  on  Several  Occasions,  1812.  (2)  Ariadne,  1814.  (3)  Carmen 
Britannicum,  1814.  (4)  The  Doge's  Daughter,  1814.  (5)  Select  Poems, 
1821.   (6)  Angelica,  1822. 

2  (1)  The  Vernal  Walk,  1798.  (2)  Night,  1818.  (3)  Lave,  a  Poem,  1823. 
(4)  The  Village  Patriarch,  1829.  (5)  Corn-Law  Rhymes,  1831.  (6)  The 
Splendid  Village,  etc.,  3  vols.,  1833-35.  (7)  Poetical  Works,  1840,  1846. 


210     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ing  in  so  much  definite  waste  of  a  special  talent,  which  could 
only  work  satisfactorily  within  certain  limits.  It  is  amusing 
to  see  the  seriousness  with  which  he  measures  himself,  in  his 
'Spirits  and  Men/  against  'all  that  is  transcendent  in  genius! 
which  has  dealt  with  similar  material,  —  Milton,  Byron, 
Moore,  and  Montgomery.  In  'The  Village  Patriarch'  he  is 
nearer  to  a  suitable  subject,  and  begins  to  express,  though  not 
yet  with  due  concentration,  his  own  message.  He  says  of 
himself :  — 

'But  distempered,  if  not  mad, 
I  feed  on  Nature's  bane  and  mess  with  scorn. 
I  would  not,  could  not  if  I  would,  be  glad, 
But,  like  shade-loving  plants,  am  happiest  sad. 
My  heart,  once  soft  as  woman's  tear,  is  gnarled 
With  gloating  on  the  ills  I  cannot  cure.' 

He  proceeds  to  compare  himself  with  'Arno's  bard/  whose 
music,  he  says,  'snarled.'  That  is  but  one  instance  of  a  radical 
lack  of  critical  sense  in  literature,  which  leads  him  to  dedicate 
his  earliest  compositions  to  Lord  Lytton  and  to  'my  great 
master,  Robert  Southey,  who  condescended  to  teach  me  the 
art  of  poetry/  and  to  characterise  Byron  as 

'thrice  a  Ford,  twice  an  Euripides, 
And  half  a  Schiller.' 

His  energy  of  speech  in  verse  was  natural  to  him  from  the 
first,  and  as  soon  as  he  began  to  subdue  its  buoyancy  and  give 
it  that  alloy,  of  prose  perhaps,  in  a  sense,  which  it  required 
for  due  hardness,  the  work  begins  to  become  interesting. 
Realism  has  never  perhaps  been  made  more  pardonable  in 
verse  than  in  some  of  Elliott's  harsh  but  vivid,  violent  but 
pungent,  delineations  of  country  scenes  and  situations.  In 
his  earlier  manner  it  is,  like  Crabbe,  hurried,  a  little  uncere- 
moniously, into  a  quicker  pace,  and  a  more  warm  and  ready 
observation.  By  1848,  'The  Year  of  Seeds/  the  style  in  these 
would-be  sonnets  has  turned  into  a  more  ragged  but  more 
muscular  activity,  coarsely  and  wonderfully  alive.    It  is  all 


EBENEZER  ELLIOTT  211 

improvised,  on  one  indignant  impulse  after  another,  but  there 
is  always,  as  in  a  Dutch  picture,  atmosphere. 

The  actual  'Corn-Law  Rhymes/  after  which  Ebenezer 
Elliott  is  commonly  named,  are  only  fifteen  in  all,  and  only 
one  or  two  of  them  are  among  his  best  work.  The  song, '  Child, 
is  Thy  Father  dead?'  can  be  compared  with  Hood,  but  just 
fails  to  touch  us  so  much  or  so  completely  to  satisfy  the  ear. 
The  '  Battle  Song  ?  has  justly  found  its  way  into  anthologies, 
though  too  Byronic  in  its  emphasis  for  really  fine  kind  of  lyric 
poetry.  But  there  are  other  pieces,  which  might  be  called 
labour  poems,  in  which  there  is  sometimes  a  quality  that  has 
analogies  both  with  Hood  and  with  Wordsworth;  as  in  the 
lines  called  '  Sabbath  Morning,'  which  bring  a  clear,  ringing, 
exultant  melody  out  of  the  mere  appeal  to  a  'young  mechanic ' 
to  go  into  the  open  air  on  a  Sunday. 

'  Then  let  me  write  for  immortality 
One  honest  song,' 

he  prayed ;  and  there  is  an  ardour  in  the  honesty  of  many  of 
his  shorter  pieces  which  lifts  them  out  of  mere  oratory,  even 
when  they  are  concerned  with  matters  of  politics,  and  oddly 
decorated  with  words  like  'Free  Trade.'  A  poem  of  twelve 
tiny  lines,  like  that  which  ends,  — 

'Then,  the  thoughtful  look  for  thunder/ 

has  gnomic  weight,  like  some  rhymed  saying  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  Thought  is  hammered  by  emotion  into  poetry.  The 
fact  is,  that  he  is  only  concerned  with  a  few  great  rights  and 
wrongs,  and  that  these  temporary  names  are  mere  labels  for 
them.  His  feeling  is  fierce  and  swift,  and  often  snatches  up  a 
wild  open-air  poetry  as  it  goes,  or  drops  to  a  deep,  thrilling 
note,  as  in  the  strange  poem  'A  Shadow/  in  which  thought 
shudders  on  unknown  verges.  This  particular  quality  is  seen 
at  its  best  in  a  haunting  poem,  written  on  one  rhyme,  and  with 
the  refrain  of  'the  land  which  no  one  knows/  a  poem  which 
is  marred  only  by  the  intrusion  of  one  uncouth,  moralising 


212     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

stanza,  where  the  prose  of  the  thought  naturally  brings  with 
it  the  single  jarring  inversion  in  an  otherwise  delicately  modu- 
lated harmony. 

'I  am  sufficiently  rewarded/  he  said,  'if  my  poetry  has  led 
one  poor  despairing  victim  of  misrule  from  the  alehouse  to  the 
fields ! ;  and  the  chief  quality  which  goes,  in  his  verse,  with  a 
fierce  indignant  sympathy  with  the  poor  is  a  continual  sense 
of  nature,  very  simply  apprehended,  and  coming  to  us  like 
the  bright  refreshing  air  of  English  lanes.  English  landscape 
is  felt  as  perhaps  no  one  else  has  quite  felt  it,  for  the  rest  and 
solace  that  it  can  give ;  so  that  the  last  lines  which  he  dictated 
before  dying  were  a  prayer  that  the  autumn  primrose  and  the 
robin's  song  might  come  back  to  him. 

There  is  much  in  Ebenezer  Elliott's  work  which  is  merely 
spasmodic,  merely  oratorical,  merely  prose  of  one  kind  or 
another.  But  his  poetical  impulse  is  unquestionable,  and 
there  is  in  it  a  solid  part  of  individuality,  in  which  tenderness 
and  irony  are  combined.  He  can  find  in  'rain,  steam,  and 
speed !  not  indeed  all  that  Turner  found  in  them,  but  that  — 

'Streams  trade  with  clouds,  seas  trade  with  heaven, 
Air  trades  with  light,  and  is  forgiven.' 

And  he  can  concern  himself  with  many  subtle  riddles,  finding 
poetry  in  the  dark  corners  of  conduct  and  conscience.  Some- 
times we  are  reminded  of  Donne,  sometimes  of  crabbed  and 
coloured  ingenuities  of  the  later  Elizabethans,  in  these 
strangely  assorted  compositions.  And,  in  spite  of  his  many 
earnest  purposes,  his  best  verse  has  an  accidental  character, 
comes  from  and  renders  a  mood,  as  lyrical  verse  is  rarely 
allowed  to  be  or  seem  by  poets  who  are  fighters  for  ideas. 


ANN  TAYLOR  AND  JANE  TAYLOR  213 


WILLIAM  NICHOLSON  (1782-1849)  » 

William  Nicholson  was  the  son  of  a  Galloway  carrier,  and 
he  turned  pedlar,  and  had  many  ups  and  downs,  until,  under 
the  advice  of  Hogg  and  other  good  friends,  he  printed  his  own 
poems  and  took  them  about  in  his  pack.  He  went  to  fairs  as 
singer  and  piper;  then  took  to  drink,  and  a  new  gospel,  which 
he  wanted  to  preach  to  the  king;  but,  coming  back  unsatisfied, 
became  a  drover. 

Three  editions  have  appeared  of  his  'Tales  in  Verse  and 
Miscellaneous  Poems ' ;  the  first  with  a  preface  of  his  own, 
the  two  others  with  memoirs.  There  is  a  rough  swing  in  his 
verses,  and  some  hearty  matter  for  the  rhymes  of  them.  He 
can  turn  a  phrase  sometimes  as  neatly  as  this :  — 

1  Ilk  is  in  its  season  sweet  ; 
So  love  is.  in  its  noon.' 


ANN  TAYLOR  (1782-1866),  AND  JANE  TAYLOR 
(1783-1824)  2 

These  sisters  both  wrote  poems  of  great  charm  and  simplicity 
for  'infant  minds,'  which  have  absorbed  and  not  yet  let  go 
such  treasures  of  song  as 'Twinkle,  Twinkle,  Little  Star/  the 
most  eminent  and  irresistible  of  them.  Their  simple  elegance 
and  friendly  feeling  for  the  young  gave  them  a  more  enviable 

1  Tales  in  Verse  and  Miscellaneous  Poems,  descriptive  of  Rural  Life 
and  Manners,  1814,  1828,  1878. 

2  Jane  Taylor  wrote  Essays  in  Rhyme,  1816;  and  Contributions  of 
Q.  Q.,  2  vols,  in  prose  and  verse,  1824.  Ann  Taylor,  The  Wedding  among 
the  Flowers,  1808.    Their  other  books  were  written  together,  namely: 

(1)  Original  Poems  for  Infant  Minds  by  Several  Young  Persons,  1804. 

(2)  Rhymes  for  the  Nursery,  1806.  (3)  Poetical  Works,  1807.  (4)  Limed 
Twigs  to  catch  Young  Birds,  1808.  (5)  Hymns  for  Infant  Minds,  1810. 
(6)  Signor  Topsy-Turvey's  Wonderful  Magic  Lantern,  1810.  (7)  Original 
Hymns  for  Sunday  Schools,  1812. 


214     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

place  than  that  of  most  of  their  more  florid  and  famous  femi- 
nine contemporaries.  The  talents  of  Jane  were  more  consider- 
able than  those  of  Ann.  She  is  something  what  Longfellow 
would  like  to  have  been ;  but  her  art  is  far  above  his.  Look 
at  '  The  Squire's  Pew/  with  its  imaginative  touches,  as  where 
the  carven  sons  and  daughters  on  a  tomb  kneel  devoutly  — 

1  As  though  they  did  intend 
For  past  omissions  to  atone 
By  saying  endless  prayers  in  stone.' 

What  esprit  and  good  sense  and  telling  rhythm  in  the  poem 
on  '  Accomplishment/  with  its  fine  ending :  — 

'Then  Science  distorted,  and  torn  into  bits, 
Art  tortur'd,  and  frighten'd  half  out  of  her  wits, 
In  portions  and  patches,  some  light  and  some  shady, 
Are  stitch'd  up  together,  and  make  a  young  lady.' 

And  what  technique,  what  ironical  tenderness,  in  the  sketch 
of  the  little  town,  with  its  gaieties  and  sorrows,  ending  with 
the  query,  May  we  not  see  those  faces  now?  and  the  answer :  — 

'  Then  hither  turn  —  yon  waving  grass 
And  mould'ring  stones  will  show; 
For  these  transactions  came  to  pass 
A  hundred  years  ago.' 

Is  it  not  Wordsworth  who  is  rebuked  in  these  lines :  — 

'  Now,  let  the  light  of  natare-boasting  man, 
"  Do  so  with  Ms  enchantments"  if  he  can!  — 
Nay,  let  him  slumber  in  luxurious  ease, 
Beneath  the  umbrage  of  his  idol  trees, 
Pluck  a  wild  daisy,  moralise  on  that, 
And  drop  a  tear  for  an  expiring  gnat, 
Watch  the  light  clouds  o'er  distant  hills  that  pass, 
Or  write  a  sonnet  to  a  blade  of  grass.' 

And  what  neatness  in  the  turn  of  such  a  couplet  as  this !  — 

'  And  't  is  but  here  and  there  you  may  descry 
The  camel  passing  tlirough  the  needle's  eye.' 


REGINALD  HEBER  215 

REGINALD   HEBER,   LORD   BISHOP   OF  CALCUTTA 
(1783-1826)  * 

It  is  difficult  to  see  why  Bishop  Heber  had,  in  his  day,  a  cer- 
tain reputation.  He  had  a  real  sense  of  parody,  and  some  of 
his  rhymes  in  '  Blue  Beard '  — 

'Was  your  father  a  wolf?  was  your  nurse  an  opossum, 
That  your  heart  does  not  melt  her  distresses  to  view  ?' 

anticipate  Mr.  Gilbert  and  the  'Bab  Ballads.'  He  wrote 
doggerel  verses  in  several  languages,  and  translated,  in  rather 
an  episcopal  way,  some  poems  from  Eastern  sources  and  six 
of  the  odes  of  Pindar.  'Southey  and  Pindar,'  he  said,  'might 
seem  to  have  drunk  at  the  same  source.'  He  left  fragments 
of  various  calm  attempts  at  romantic  work,  and  of  a  '  World 
before  the  Flood,'  with  other  biblical  narratives,  which  he 
completed,  in  the  manner  of  the  time.  He  also  wrote  a  number 
of  hymns,  not  nearly  as  good  as  Montgomery's,  though  some 
of  them  have  remained  popular  in  all  the  churches.  'From 
Greenland's  Icy  Mountains '  is  not  the  best,  but  it  is  the  best 
known,  and  can  hardly  have  been  forgotten  by  any  one  who 
had  heard  it  sung  repeatedly  in  his  youth.  I  cannot  see  that 
there  is  any  resemblance  to  poetry  even  in  the  famous :  — 

'  Though  every  prospect  pleases 
And  only  man  is  vile,' 

which  would  have  pleased  Cowper.  Personally  I  prefer  the 
ballad-like  effect  of  'God  is  gone  up  with  a  merry  noise,' 
though  the  remainder  is  less  profane  than  might  be  con- 
jectured from  the  commencement.  But  I  do  not  see  that  any 
of  the  hymns  pass  from  the  condition  of  hymn  to  that  of  poem. 

1  (1)  Palestine,  1807.    (2)  Poems,  1812.    (3)  Poetical  Works,  1841. 


216     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


JAMES    SHERIDAN    KNOWLES    (1784-1862)  l 

James  Sheridan  Knowles  had  some  of  the  Irish  qualities  for 
writing  for  the  stage,  and  was,  besides,  himself  an  actor.  All 
the  '  ebullition  of  an  Irish  heart/  as  the  prologue  to  one  of  his 
plays  called  it,  did  not  prevent  him  from  writing  much  dull 
work  of  the  romantic  kind,  in  which  the  Elizabethan  domestic 
drama,  as  we  see  it  in  such  plays  as  '  A  Woman  Killed  with 
Kindness,'  is  imitated  in  a  merely  exterior  way,  without  any 
of  the  natural  pathos  and  instinctive  poetry  of  that  minor 
growth  of  a  great  period.  Where  he  is  at  his  best  is  in  a  comedy 
like  'The  Love-Chase,'  which  does  over  again,  with  vitality 
and  lightness,  some  of  the  characteristic  comic  work  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  The  verse  is  adequate  to  material  so 
slight  and  effective,  and  the  two  women,  the  hoyden  Con- 
stance and  the  Widow  Green,  are  good  studies  in  almost  seri- 
ous farce.  Elsewhere  in  plays  that  try  to  represent  romance  in 
modern  life,  the  form  and  material  never  come  together,  and 
the  colloquial  verse  of  the  speech  is  apt  to  take  refuge  in  the 
worse  than  prose  of  such  inversions  as:  'Where  bought  you 
it?'  The  romance  is  of  a  purely  stage  kind,  and  the  touches 
of  nature  that  come  into  it  are  hardly  at  home  there.  It  seems 
to  be  trying  to  fill  a  gap  between  the  stage  and  literature. 
In  all  the  verse,  among  much  clever  writing,  and  some  good 
sense  and  piquancy  in  what  it  has  to  render,  there  is  never 
anything  one  can  properly  call  poetry.  It  is  quite  easy  to  see 
that  such  work  must  have  been  popular  in  its  time. 

1  (1)  The  Welsh  Harper,  1796.  (2)  Fugitive  Pieces,  1810.  (3)  Brian 
Boroihme,  1811.  (4)  Caius  Gracchus,  1815.  (5)  Virginius,  1820.  (6)  Wil- 
liam Tell,  1825.  (7)  Alfred  the  Great,  1831.  (8)  A  Masque  on  the  Death 
of  Sir  Walter  Scott,  1832.  (9)  The  Hunchback,  1832.  (10)  The  Wife,  1833. 
(11)  The  Beggar  of  Bethnal  Green,  1834.  (12)  The  Daughter,  1837.  (13) 
The  Love-Chase,  1837.  (14)  The  Bridal,  1837.  (15)  Woman's  Wit,  1838. 
(16)  The  Maid  of  Mariendorpt,  1838.  (17)  Love,  1839.  (18)  John  of  Pro- 
cida,  1840.  (19)  Old  Maids,  1841.  (20)  The  Rose  of  Aragon,  1842.  (21)  The 
Secretary,  1843.   (22)  True  unto  Death,  1863. 


WILLIAM  TENNANT  217 


BERNARD  BARTON  (1784-1849)  1 

The  Quaker  poet,  Bernard  Barton,  is  remembered  only  be- 
cause he  was  a  friend  of  Lamb.  We  gather  a  pleasant  sense  of 
him  as  a  man  from  Lamb's  letters  and  from  the  memorial 
sketch  by  Edward  FitzGerald,  printed  as  an  introduction  to 
the  last  collection  of  his  poems.  FitzGerald  admits  that  '  he 
was  not  fastidious  himself  about  exactness  of  thought  or  of 
harmony  of  numbers,  and  he  could  scarce  comprehend  why 
the  public  should  be  less  easily  satisfied.'  Lamb  said  that  one 
poem  in  memory  of  Bloomfield  was  'sweet  with  Doric  deli- 
cacy/ and  here  and  there  we  may  find  a  sort  of  pious  epigram 
not  wholly  without  merit,  to  those  at  least  who  do  not  re- 
quire pleasant  versification  to  be  poetry.  Gentle  and  ineffec- 
tual, he  is  without  affectation,  and  it  is  easy  to  see  what  Lamb, 
who  was  lenient  to  his  friends,  found  to  like  in  verses  that  are 
hardly  likely  to  be  read  any  longer. 


WILLIAM  TENNANT  (1784-1848)  2 

Tennant's  'Anster  Fair,'  published  in  1814,  is  a  partly  bur- 
lesque and  partly  realistic  poem,  written  in  the  ottava  rima, 
'  shut  with  the  Alexandrine  of  Spenser,  that  its  close  may  be 

1  (1)  Metrical  Effusions,  1812.  (2)  The  Convict's  Appeal,  1818.  (3) 
Poems  by  an  Amateur,  1818.  (4)  Poems,  1820.  (5)  Napoleon  and  other 
Poems,  1822.  (6)  Verses  on  the  Death  of  P.  B.  Shelley,  1822.  (7)  Devotional 
Verses,  1826.  (8)  A  Missionary's  Memoir,  1826.  (9)  A  Widow's  Tale, 
1827.  (10)  A  New  Year's  Eve,  1828.  (11)  The  Reliquary  (with  his  daugh- 
ter), 1836.  (12)  Household  Verse,  1845.  (13)  Seaweeds,  1846.  (14)  Birth- 
day Verses  at  Eighty-four,  1846.  (15)  A  Memorial  of  J.  J.  Gurney, 
1847.  (16)  A  Brief  Memorial  of  Major  E.  M.  Wood,  1848.  (17)  On  the 
Signs  of  the  Times,  1848.  (18)  Ichabod,  1848.  (19)  Poems  and  Letters, 
1849. 

2  (1)  Anster  Fair,  1814.  (2)  Elegy  on  Trottin'  Nanny,  1814.  (3)  Dom- 
inie's Disaster,  1816.  (4)77ie  Thane  of  Fife,  1822.  (5)  Cardinal  Beaton, 
1823.  (6)  John  Balliol,  1825.  (7)  Papistry  Storm'd,  1827.  (8)  Hebrew 
Dramas,  1845. 


218     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

more  full  and  sounding.'  The  metrical  ignorance  shown  in  this 
disfigurement  of  a  fine  metre,  wholly  adequate  within  its  own 
limits,  is  further  shown  by  the  attempt  to  get  burlesque 
rhymes  out  of  such  combinations  as  '  Hercules '  and  '  a  most 
confounded  yerk,  alas.'  '  Ancient  and  modern  manners  are 
mixed  and  jumbled  together/  as  the  writer  truthfully  admits, 
'  to  heighten  the  humour  or  variegate  the  description.'  Local 
colour  there  is,  but  of  a  truly  jumbled  kind ;  and  the  humour, 
part  pleasant,  part  fairy,  is  unconvincing.  The  writer's  prayer 
was  no  doubt  answered :  — 

'O  that  my  noddle  were  a  seething  kettle, 
Frothing  with  bombast  o'er  the  Muses'  fire ! ' 

'The  Thane  of  Fife,'  written  seven  years  afterwards  in  the 
same  metre,  tries  to  be  more  serious,  and  introduces  imagery 
of  this  kind :  — 

'  Now,  in  the  very  navel  of  the  sky, 
Rolled  in  the  vestment  of  her  own  fair  light, 
The  gentle  moon  was  walking  upon  high.' 

It  ends  in  the  middle  of  a  stanza,  and  the  author  (though,  he 
says,  'I  have  never  allowed  the  writing  of  verses  to  interfere 
either  with  my  professional  duties  or  my  more  solid  and  nutri- 
tive studies ')  promises,  in  return  for  approval,  a  continuation, 
which  never  seems  to  have  been  required.  a 


JAMES  HENRY  LEIGH  HUNT  (1784-1859) » 

The  poetry  of  Leigh  Hunt  has  more  importance  historically 
than  actually.    Historically,  it  has  its  place  in  the  romantic 

1  (1)  Juvenilia,  1801.  (2)  The  Feast  of  the  Poets,  1814.  (3)  The  Descent 
of  Liberty,  1815.  (4)  The  Story  of  Rimini,  1816.  (5)  Foliage,  1818.  (6) 
Poetical  Works,  1819.  (7)  Hero  and  Leander,  1819.  (8)  Amyntas,  1820. 
(9)  Ultra-Crepidarius,  1823.  (10)  Bacchus  in  Tuscany,  from  Francesco 
Redi,  1825.  (11)  Captain  Sword  and  Captain  Pen,  1835.  (12)  Blue  Stock- 
ing Revels,  undated.  (13)  The  Legend  of  Florence,  1840.  (14)  The  Palfrey, 
1842.  (15)  Stories  in  Verse,  1855.  (16)  Poetical  Works,  incomplete,  1860. 


JAMES  HENRY  LEIGH  HUNT  219 

movement,  where  Leigh  Hunt  is  seen  fighting,  though  under 
alien  colours,  by  the  side  of  Wordsworth.  His  chief  aim  was  to 
bring  about  an  emancipation  of  the  speech  and  metre  of  poetry, 
and  he  had  his  share  in  doing  so.  The  early  style  of  Keats  owes 
much  of  its  looseness  and  lusciousness  to  an  almost  deliberate 
modelling  himself  upon  the  practice  and  teaching  of  Hunt. 
'I  have  something  in  common  with  Hunt,'  Keats  admitted, 
in  a  letter  written  in  1818;  and  the  'Quarterly/  in  its  review 
of  'Endjuiion,'  defined  Keats  as  a  'simple  neophyte  of  the 
writer  of  "  The  Story  of  Rimini.'' '  That  poem  had  been  pub- 
lished only  two  years,  but  had  already  made  a  small  revolu- 
tionary fame  of  its  own. 

For  its  actual  qualities,  this  poetry,  which  seems  now  to 
have  so  slight  an  existence  by  the  side  of  the  still  almost  popu- 
lar prose-writings,  is  not  so  easily  valued.  Infinite  tiny  sparks 
flicker  throughout,  but  are  rarely  alight  long  enough  to  set  a 
steady  fire  burning.  One  lyric,  a  few  sonnets,  an  anecdote  or 
two,  a  few  passages  of  description  or  of  dialogue,  —  can  we 
reckon  up  more  than  these  in  a  final  estimate  of  the  value  of 
this  poetry  as  a  whole?  Yet  are  not  these  few  successful  things, 
each  rare  of  its  kind,  themselves  sufficient  to  make  the  reputa- 
tion of  one  who  was  content  to  be  remembered  in  whatever 
'  humble  category  of  poet,  or  in  what  humblest  corner  of  the 
category,'  it  remained  for  'another  and  wholly  dispassionate 
generation '  to  place  him? 

'The  Story  of  Rimini '  as  it  was  published  in  1816  is  a  very 
different  thing  from  the  revised  version  of  1832,  with  its  're- 
jection of  superfluities,'  its  correction  of  '  mistakes  of  all  kinds.! 
It  may  be  quite  true,  as  the  author  protested,  that  the  first 
edition  contained  weak  lines,  together  with  'certain  conven- 
tionalities of  structure,  originating  in  his  having  had  his  studies 
too  early  directed  towards  the  artificial  instead  of  the  natural 
poets.'  Yet,  in  fact,  the  second  version  is  much  more  artificial 
than  the  first,  and  what  was  young,  spontaneous,  really  new 
at  the  time,  has  given  way  to  a  firmer  but  less  felicitous  style 


220      ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

of  speech  and  versification.  Such  puerilities,  of  the  kind  which 
Hunt  very  nearly  taught  to  Keats,  as,  — 

'What  need  I  tell  of  lovely  lips,  and  eyes, 
A  clipsome  waist,  and  bosom's  balmy  rise?' 

are  indeed  partly,  though  not  wholly  obliterated,  and  for  the 
better;  and  the  terrible  line,  revealing  all  Hunt's  vulgarities 
at  a  stroke,  — 

'  She  had  stout  notions  on  the  marrying  score,' 

disappears  into  the  discreet  — 

'  She  had  a  sense  of  marriage,  just  and  free.' 

Yet  what  goes,  and  is  ill  supplied,  is  such  frank  bright  speech 

as, — 

'  A  moment's  hush  succeeds ;  and  from  the  walls, 
Firm  and  at  once,  a  silver  answer  calls,'  — 

which  turns  into  the  droning,  — 

'  The  crowd  are  mute ;  and  from  the  southern  wall, 
A  lordly  blast  gives  welcome  to  the  call.' 

The  simple  country  landscape  is  changed,  because  the  author 
has  seen  Italy,  to  the  due  citrons  and  pine-trees;  but  such 
evocations  of  the  fancy  cannot  be  done  twice  over,  and  the 
freshness  goes  as  the  '  local  colour '  comes  on.  Even  more  in- 
excusable are  the  moral  interpositions,  such  as  the  tears  and 
explanations  of  Francesca  at  the  fatal  moment,  by  which 
Dante  and  the  picture  are  spoiled.  'The  mode  of  treatment 
still  remains  rather  material  than  spiritual/  Hunt  admits, 
without  fully  realising  how  much  he  is  losing  in  material 
beauty,  and  how  incapable  he  is  of  replacing  it  by  any  kind 
of  spiritual  beauty. 

Byron,  to  whom  '  The  Story  of  Rimini '  is  dedicated,  said  of 
it  in  a  letter :  '  Leigh  Hunt's  poem  is  a  devilish  good  one  — 
quaint  here  and  there,  but  with  the  substratum  of  originality, 
and  with  poetry  about  it  that  will  stand  the  test.'  It  has  not 


JAMES  HENRY  LEIGH  HUNT  221 

stood  the  test,  and  is  now  quoted  nowhere  but  in  the  footnotes 
to  Keats;  but  it  is  full  of  those  suggestions  which  lesser  men 
are  often  at  the  pains  of  making  for  the  benefit  of  their  betters. 
All  its  'leafy'  and  rejoicing  quality,  its  woodlands  and  painted 
'  luxuries/  were  to  have  their  influence,  direct  or  reflected,  on 
much  of  the  romantic  poetry  of  the  century. 

Before  writing  'The  Story  of  Rimini/  Hunt  had  published 
a  satire  in  verse,  called  'The  Feast  of  the  Poets/  which  he  was 
to  rewrite  and  republish  at  intervals  during  his  life.  It  was 
the  first  of  what  was  to  be  a  series  of  bookish  poems,  in  which 
he  expressed  the  most  personal  part  of  himself,  but  that  part 
which  was  best  fitted  perhaps  for  poetry.  Few  men  have  loved 
literature  more  passionately  and  more  humbly  than  Leigh 
Hunt,  or  with  a  generosity  more  disinterested.  Books  were 
nearer  to  him  than  men,  though  he  sought  in  books  chiefly 
their  human  or  pleasing  qualities.  But  his  poetry  about  books 
never  passes  from  criticism  to  creation,  as  when  Drayton 
writes  his  letter  to  H.  Reynolds,  and  Shelley  his  letter  to  Maria 
Gisborne.  We  shall  find  no  '  brave  translunary  things '  and  no 
'  hooded  eagle  among  blinking  owls.'  He  tells  us  that  what  the 
public  approved  of  in  'The Feast  of  the  Poets'  was  a  'mixture 
of  fancy  and  familiarity ' ;  but  the  savour  has  wholly  gone  out 
of  it.  The  criticism  in  the  twenty-five  pages  of  the  poem  is  su- 
perficial and  obvious,  and  the  verse  jingles  like  the  bells  on 
a  fool's  bauble.  The  criticism  in  the  one  hundred  and  twenty- 
five  pages  of  the  notes  has  still  interest  for  us,  if  not  value. 
There  is  always  in  Leigh  Hunt's  criticism  something  of  haste 
and  temporariness,  and  it  is  generally  revised  in  every  new 
edition.  Here,  the  recognition,  on  second  thoughts,  that 
Wordsworth  is  the  chief  poet  of  the  age,  together  with  the 
good-natured,  superior,  and  impertinent  advice  which  he  gives 
him  for  the  bettering  of  his  poetry,  has  something  more  than 
curiosity  as  coming  from  Leigh  Hunt,  and  in  1814.  The  scorn 
of  Southey,  who  'naturally  borrows  his  language  from  those 
who  have  thought  for  him/  remains  good  criticism,  and  there 


222     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

are  phrases  in  a  somewhat  unjust  estimate  of  Scott  which  are 
not  without  relevance;  as  when  we  are  told  that  'he  talks  the 
language  of  no  times  and  of  no  feelings,  for  his  style  is  too 
flowing  to  be  ancient,  too  antique  to  be  modern,  and  too  arti- 
ficial in  every  respect  to  be  the  result  of  his  own  first  im- 
pressions.' He  is  reasonably  fair  to  Crabbe,  though  with 
evident  effort,  and  sees  through  Rogers  without  effort.  But 
the  accidental  qualities  of  his  taste  betray  themselves  in  the 
sympathetic  praise  of  Moore,  in  the  preference  for '  Gertrude 
of  Wyoming '  as  '  the  finest  narrative  poem  that  has  been  pro- 
duced in  the  present  day,'  in  the  contemptuous  reference  to 
Landor  as  '  a  very  worthy  person,'  and  to  '  Gebir '  as  '  an  epic 
piece  of  gossiping,'  and  in  the  uncertainty  and  apparent  dis- 
taste of  what  is  meant  to  be  said  not  unfavourably  of  Cole- 
ridge. In  the  final  edition,  nearly  fifty  years  later,  Coleridge, 
'whose  poetry's  poetry's  self,'  is  promoted  to  the  place  of 
Wordsworth. 
Y  Hunt's  miscellaneous  mind  was  active,  sympathetic,  forag- 
ing; he  made  discoveries  by  some  ready  instinct  which  had 
none  of  the  certainty  of  the  divining  rod ;  he  was  a  freebooter, 
who  captured  various  tracts  of  the  enemy,  but  could  not 
guard  or  retain  them.  He  was  among  the  first  to  help  in  break- 
ing down  the  eighteenth-century  formalism  in  verse,  in  letting 
loose  a  free  and  natural  speech;  but  his  influence  was  not 
always  a  safe  one.  In  1829  Shelley  writes  to  him,  in  sending 
the  manuscript  of  '  Julian  and  Maddalo ' :  '  You  will  find  the 
little  piece,  I  think,  in  some  degree  consistent  with  your  own 
ideas  of  the  manner  in  which  poetry  ought  to  be  written.  I 
have  employed  a  certain  familiar  style  of  language  to  express 
the  actual  way  in  which  people  talk  with  each  other,  whom 
education  and  a  certain  refinement  of  sentiment  have  placed 
above  the  use  of  vulgar  idioms.' 

It  was  just  that  proviso  that  Leigh  Hunt  neglected.  What 
he  really  brings  into  poetry  is  a  tone  of  chatty  colloquialism, 
meant  to  give  ease,  from  which,  however,  the  vulgar  idioms 


JAMES  HENRY  LEIGH  HUNT  223 

are  not  excluded.  He  introduces  a  new  manner,  smooth,  free, 
and  easy,  a  melting  cadence,  which  he  may  have  thought 
he  found  in  Spenser,  whom  he  chooses  among  poets  'for  lux- 
ury.' The  least  lofty  of  English  poets,  he  went  to  the  loftiest 
among  them  only  for  his  sensitiveness  to  physical  delight. 
His  own  verse  is  always  feminine,  luscious,  with  a  luxury 
which  is  Creole,  and  was  perhaps  in  his  blood.  He  would  go 
back  to  such  dainty  Elizabethans  as  Lodge,  but  his  languid 
pleasures  have  no  edge  of  rapture;  the  lines  trot  and  amble, 
never  fly. 

Hunt  mastered  many  separate  tricks  and  even  felicities  in 
verse,  and  acquired  a  certain  lightness  and  deftness  which  is 
occasionally  almost  wholly  successful,  as  in  an  actual  master- 
piece of  the  trifling,  like  'Jenny  kissed  me.'  But  he  did  not 
realise  that  lightness  cannot  be  employed  in  dealing  with 
tragic  material,  unless  it  is  sharpened  to  so  deadly  a  point 
as  Byron  and  Heine  could  give  to  it.  It  is  difficult  to  realise 
that  it  is  the  same  hand  which  writes  the  line  that  delighted 
Keats,  — 

'  Places  of  nestling  green  for  poets  made, '  — 

and,  not  far  off,  these  dreadful  lines,  — 

l  {  '  The  two  divinest  things  the  world  has  got, 

A  lovely  woman  in  a  rural  spot.' 

The  ignoble  quality  of  jauntiness  mars  almost  the  whole  of 
Hunt's  work,  in  which  liberty  cannot  withhold  itself  from 
license.   The  man  who  can  wish  a  beloved  woman 

'  To  haunt  his  eye,  like  taste  personified/ 

cannot  be  aware  of  what  taste  really  is;  and,  with  a  power 
of  rendering  sensation,  external  delicacies  of  sight  and  hear- 
ing, which  is  to  be  envied  and  outdone  by  Keats,  he  is  never 
quite  certain  in  his  choice  between  beauty  and  prettiness, 
sentiment  and  sentimentality. 

In  his  later  works  Hunt  learned  something  of  restraint,  and 


224     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

when  he  came  to  attempt  the  drama,  though  he  tried  to  be 
at  the  same  time  realistic  and  romantic,  was  more  able  to 
suit  his  manner  to  his  material.  The  'Legend  of  Florence' 
has  his  ripest  feeling  and  his  most  chastened  style,  and  more 
than  anything  else  he  did  in  verse  reflects  him  to  us  as,  in  Shel- 
ley's phrase,  '  one  of  those  happy  souls 

"  Which  are  the  salt  of  the  earth." ' 

The  gentle  Elizabethan  manner  is  caught  up  and  revived 
for  a  moment,  and  there  is  a  human  tenderness  which  may 
well  remind  us  of  such  more  masterly  work  as  'A  Woman 
Killed  with  Kindness.' 

Hunt  was  convinced  that  'we  are  more  likely  to  get  at  a 
real  poetical  taste  through  the  Italian  than  through  the  French 
school,'  and  he  names  together  Spenser,  Milton,  and  Ariosto, 
thinking  that  these  in  common  would  'teach  us  to  vary  our 
music  and  to  address  ourselves  more  directly  to  nature.' 
Naming  his  favourite  poets,  he  begins  with  '  Pulci,  for  spirits 
and  a  fine  free  way.'  To  acquaint  English  taste  with  Italian 
models  he  did  many  brilliant  translations,  Dante  being  less 
perfectly  within  his  means  than  Ariosto  or  Tasso.  He  was  best 
and  most  at  his  ease  in  rendering  the  irregular  lines  of  Redi, 
whose  '  Bacchus  in  Tuscany '  he  translated  in  full.  In  this, 
and  in  the  version  from  the  Latin  of  Walter  de  Mapes,  there 
is  a  blithe  skill  which  few  translators  have  attained.  It  was 
through  his  fancy  for  Italian  burlesque  that  Hunt  came  to  do 
a  number  of  his  characteristic  and  least  English  things,  like 
the  laughing  and  lilting  verses  which  sometimes,  as  in  'The 
Fairy  Concert,'  attain  a  kind  of  glittering  gaiety,  hardly  mere 
paste,  though  with  no  hardness  of  the  diamond.  There  is  some 
relationship  between  this  verse  and  what  we  call  vers  de  societe  ; 
but  it  is  more  critical,  and  has  something  of  the  epigram  set 
to  a  jig.  So  far  as  it  is  meant  for  political  satire,  it  is  only 
necessary  to  compare  even  so  brilliant  a  squib  as  the  '  Corona- 
tion Soliloquy  of  George  IV '  with  Coleridge's  '  Fire,  Famine, 


JAMES  HENRY  LEIGH  HUNT  225 

and  Slaughter,'  to  realise  how  what  in  Hunt  remains  buffoon- 
ery and  perhaps  argument  can  be  carried  to  a  point  of  im- 
agination at  which  it  becomes  poetry. 

Hunt  has  a  special  talent,  connected  with  his  feeling  for 
whatever  approached  the  form  of  the  epigram,  for  the  writing 
of  brief  narrative  poems.  Can  it  be  denied  that  so  masterly  an 
anecdote  as  '  AboubenAdhem'  has  in  it  some  of  the  qualities, 
as  it  seems  to  have  some  of  the  results,  of  poetry?  Read  the 
same  story  in  the  French  prose  of  the  original :  nothing  is 
changed,  nothing  added;  only  the  form  of  the  verse,  barely 
existent  as  it  is,  has  given  a  certain  point  and  finish  to  the 
prose  matter.  Here  and  in  the  two  or  three  other  stories  there 
is  a  very  precise  and  ingenious  grasp  on  story-telling,  worthy 
of  Maupassant ;  and  there  is  a  kernel  of  just,  at  times  of  pro- 
found, thought,  which  suggests  something  of  the  quality  of 
an  Eastern  apologue.  Was  it  the  more  than  half  prose  talent 
of  Hunt  that  gave  him,  when  he  concentrated  so  tightly 
his  generally  diffuse  and  wandering  verse,  this  particular, 
unusual  kind  of  success?  When,  as  in  blank  verse  pieces  such 
as  'Paganini/  he  tried  to  get  a  purely  emotional  effect,  not  by 
narrative  but  in  the  form  of  confession,  his  failure  was  com- 
plete ;  all  is  restlessness  and  perturbation.  But,  once  at  least, 
in  a  little  piece  called  'Ariadne  Walking,'  there  is  something 
of  the  same  happy  concentration,  the  same  clean  outlines; 
and  the  poem  may  be  paralleled  with  a  lovely  poem  of  Alfred 
de  Vigny.  The  technique,  as  in  almost,  or,  perhaps,  every- 
thing of  Hunt,  is  not  perfect;  and  there  are  words  of  mere 
prose,  like  'the  feel  of  sleep.'  How  was  it  that  a  man,  really 
poetically  minded,  and  with  so  much  knowledge  of  all  the 
forms  of  verse,  was  never  quite  safe  when  he  wrote  in  metre? 

A  stanza  in  a  poem  on  poppies  may  be  compared,  almost 
in  detail,  with  a  corresponding  sentence  in  prose,  which  occurs 
in  a  rambling  essay.  They  both  say  the  same  thing,  but  the 
verse  says,  — 


op  THE 


226     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'We  are  slumberous  poppies, 
Lords  of  Lethe  downs, 
Some  awake  and  some  asleep, 
Sleeping  in  our  crowns. 
What  perchance  our  dreams  may  know, 
Let  our  serious  beauty  show.' 

And  the  prose  says,  'They  look  as  if  they  held  a  mystery  at 
their  hearts,  like  sleeping  kings  of  Lethe/  and  comes  nearer 
to  poetry. 

From  the  epigram  to  the  sonnet  there  is  but  one  step,  and 
Leigh  Hunt's  finest  and  most  famous  line, — 

'The  laughing  queen  that  caught  the  world's  great  hands,'  — 

is  found  in  a  sonnet  on  the  Nile,  written  impromptu  in  rivalry 
with  Keats  and  Shelley,  and  more  successful,  within  its  limits, 
than  its  competitors.  And  the  sonnet,  written  against  Keats, 
on  the  subject  of  'The  Grasshopper  and  the  Cricket,'  would 
be  good  as  well  as  characteristic  if  it  were  not  flawed  by  words 
like  'feel'  and  'class'  and  'nick/  used  to  give  the  pleasant 
charm  of  talk,  but  resulting  only  in  a  degradation  of  refined 
and  dignified  speech.  Three  sonnets  called  'The  Fish,  the 
Man,  and  the  Spirit/  which  might  easily  have  been  no  more 
than  one  of  Hunt's  clever  burlesques,  seem  to  me  for  once  to 
touch  and  seize  and  communicate  a  strange,  cold,  inhuman 
imagination,  as  if  the  very  element  of  water  entered  into  chill 
communion  with  the  mind.  Lamb  might  have  shared  the 
feeling,  the  epithets  are  like  the  best  comic  Greek  compounds ; 
the  poetry,  which  begins  with  a  strange  familiarity,  ends  with 
a  strangeness  wholly  of  elemental  wonder :  — 

'  Man's  life  is  warm,  glad,  sad,  'twixt  love  and  graves, 
Boundless  in  hope,  honoured  with  pangs  austere, 
Heaven-gazing ;  and  his  angel-wings  he  craves : 
The  fish  is  swift,  small-needing,  vague  yet  clear, 
A  cold,  sweet,  silver  life,  wrapped  round  in  waves, 
Quickened  with  touches  of  transporting  fear.' 

There,  at  least,  Leigh  Hunt  speaks  the  language  of  poetry,  and 
with  a  personal  accent. 


ALLAN  CUNNINGHAM  227 


ALLAN  CUNNINGHAM  (1784-1842)  * 

Allan  Cunningham  has  been  praised,  with  and  without  dis- 
crimination, by  many  more  famous  persons,  from  Scott,  who 
christened  him  'honest  Allan,'  to  Southey,  who  called  him 
'Allan, true  child  of  Scotland';  but  he  has  never  been  better 
characterised  than  by  a  Mr.  McDiarmid,  at  a  banquet  given  in 
his  honour  at  Dumfries : '  As  a  poet  he  leans  to  the  ballad  style 
of  composition,  and  many  of  his  lyrics  are  eminently  sweet, 
graceful,  and  touching.'  So  much  may  be  said  in  his  favour, 
though  it  is  difficult  to  be  very  precise  in  dealing  with  one  who 
had  so  little  sense  of  the  difference  between  what  was  his  and 
what  came  from  others.  He  began  by  inventing  a  series  of 
Scotch  'remains'  for  the  inveterate  Cromek,  who  rewarded 
him  with  '  a  bound  copy '  of  a  book  not  even  published  under 
his  name.  There  is  generally  in  his  verse,  which  is  equally  tell- 
ing in  a  Scotch  ballad  in  the  manner  of  Burns,  such  as  'My 
Nannie  0/  or  an  English  sea-ballad  in  the  manner  of  Dibdin, 
such  as  'A  wet  sheet  and  a  flowing  sea,'  some  sort  of  imitation, 
something  not  wholly  individual,  and  at  his  best  he  does  not 
go  beyond  a  pleasant  spontaneity  in  which  there  is  no  really 
lasting  quality.  His  kindest  critic,  Scott,  who  called  him  a 
man  of  genius,  noted  in  his  diary  that  he  'required  the  tact 
of  knowing  when  and  where  to  stop ' ;  and  in  a  letter  to  him  he 
said  candidly:  'Here  and  there  I  would  pluck  a  flower  from 
your  posy  to  give  what  remains  an  effect  of  greater  simplicity.' 
The  same  luxuriance  renders  his  prose  vague,  as  his  facts  are, 
in  the  'Lives  of  British  Painters,'  meant  to  be  instructive, 
and  in  their  way  really  sympathetic.  He  had  many  lively 
and  attractive  qualities,  as  a  man  and  as  a  writer;  and  received 
at  least  his  due  measure  of  fame  during  his  lifetime. 

1  (1)  Songs,  Chiefly  in  the  Rural  Dialect  of  Scotland,  1813.  (2)  Remains 
of  Nithsdale  and  Galloway  Song,  1820.  (3)  Sir  Marmaduke  Maxwell,  1822 
(4)  The  Songs  of  Scotland,  Ancient  and  Modern,  1825.  (5)  The  Maid  of 
Elwar,  1833. 


223     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


REV.  CHARLES  STRONG   (1785-1864)  1 

Charles  Strong  is  remembered  only  by  two  sonnets,  his 
best,  which  are  to  be  seen  in  anthologies,  the  one  beginning 
'Time,  I  rejoice,  amid  the  ruin  wide/  and  another  beginning 
'  My  window  's  open  to  the  evening  sky.'  The  greater  number 
of  the  other  sonnets  in  his  single  book  of  original  verse  are 
worked  up  a  little  consciously  towards  a  final  effect  in  the 
last  line,  and  are  somewhat  obvious  in  the  meditations  over 
foreign  sites  which  make  up  much  of  their  substance.  Occa- 
sionally we  meet  with  a  good  separate  line  or  two,  such  as :  — 

'  On  the  blue  waste  a  pyramid  of  sails ' ; 

or  as  this :  — 

'And,  on  the  true  vine  grafted,  there  remain 
A  living  branch,  until  the  vintage  bears.' 

A  more  carefully  cultivated  sonority  distinguishes  the  trans- 
lated verse  in  the  '  Specimens  of  Sonnets  from  the  Most  Cele- 
brated Italian  Poets/  a  chill  and  literal  rendering  of  Italian 
sonnets  from  Dante  to  Metastasio.  They  take  no  new  growth 
in  English  soil,  but  retain  that  formal  eloquence  which  in  so 
much  of  Italian  verse  takes  the  place  of  poetry.  Could  Fraca- 
storo  have  desired  a  translator  more  after  his  heart  than  the 
writer  who  follows  him,  slow-pacing,  with :  — 

'  Whether  it  be  Achilles'  high  disdain 
Or  wise  Ulysses'  toilsome  pilgrimage'? 


HENRY  KIRKE  WHITE   (1785-1806)  2 

The  discovery  of  Kirke  White  was  one  of  the  unlucky  dis- 
coveries of  Southey,  who  tells  us  that,  but  for  him,  'his  papers 

1  (1)   Specimens  of  Sonnets  from  the  Most  Celebrated  Italian  Poets; 
with  Translations,  1827.   (2)  Sonnets,  1835. 

2  (1)  Clifton  Grove,  1804.    (2)  Life  and  Remains,  edited  by  Southey 
2  vols.,  1810. 


HENRY  KIRKE  WHITE  229 

would  probably  have  remained  in  oblivion,  and  his  name,  in  a 
few  years,  have  been  forgotten.'  'Unhappy  White,'  as  Byron 
called  him  in  a  passage  which  has  been  remembered  for  its 
imagery,  died  in  his  twenty-second  year,  and  his  papers  were 
handed  over  to  Southey,  who  tells  us  '  Mr.  Coleridge  was  pre- 
sent when  I  opened  them,  and  was,  as  well  as  myself,  equally 
affected  and  astonished  at  the  proofs  of  industry  which  they 
displayed.'  He  adds:  'I  have  inspected  all  the  existing  manu- 
scripts of  Chatterton,  and  they  excited  less  wonder  than  these.' 
'He  surely  ranks  next  to  Chatterton,'  said  Byron,  when 
Southey  published  the  '  Remains '  with  a  memoir  and  some 
five  and  thirty  pages  of  memorial  verses  by  various  hands. 
Kirke  White  had  published  a  small  volume  at  the  age  of  eigh- 
teen, and  a  judicious  critic  in  the  '  Monthly  Review '  had  said 
of  the  writer:  'We  commend  his  exertions,  and  his  laudable 
endeavours  to  excel;  but  we  cannot  compliment  him  with 
having  learned  the  difficult  art  of  writing  good  poetry.'  This 
opinion,  which  seemed  to  Southey  a  'cruelty,'  a  'wicked  in- 
justice,' requires  no  revision. 

'It  is  not  possible,'  says  Southey,  'to  conceive  a  human 
being  more  amiable  in  all  the  relations  of  life,'  and  he  as- 
sumes that  the  reader  'will  take  some  interest  in  all  those 
remains  because  they  are  his;  he  who  shall  feel  none  must 
have  a  blind  heart,  and  therefore  a  blind  understanding.' 
There  is,  indeed,  no  other  reason  for  interest  in  these  gen- 
erally unaffected  but  always  conventional  verses  than  because 
they  are  the  expression,  tinged  with  reluctant  resignation,  of 
one  who  is,  as  he  says,  about  to  'compose  his  decent  head, 
and  breathe  his  last.'  What  Byron  called  his  '  bigotry  i  is  a 
genuine  but  not  very  individual  sense  of  piety,  and  all  his 
verse  is  an  amiable  echo  of  such  literature  as  most  appealed  to 
one  who  found  '  a  nervous  strength  of  diction  and  a  wild  free- 
dom of  versification,  combined  with  an  euphonious  melody 
and  consonant  cadence,  unequalled  in  the  English  language' 
in  the  sonnets  of  Bowles,  and  said  of  Milton's  sonnets  that 


230     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'those  to  the  Nightingale  and  to  Mr.  Lawrence  are,  I  think, 
alone  entitled  to  the  praise  of  mediocrity.'  Nothing  can  be 
more  inoffensive  than  the  mild  fancies  and  plaintive  pieties  of 
a  young  writer  who  has  often  been  wrongly  characterised  as 
immature.  The  crop  was  ripe  enough,  but  it  was  a  thin  crop. 
They  are  alone,  I  think,  entitled  to  the  praise  of  mediocrity. 


THOMAS  LOVE  PEACOCK  (1785-1866)  » 

Peacock's  novels  are  unique  in  English,  and  are  among  the 
most  scholarly,  original,  and  entertaining  prose  writings  of 
the  century. 

'  A  strain  too  learned  for  a  shallow  age, 
Too  wise  for  selfish  bigots,' 

Shelley  denned  it,  and  added  prophetically :  — 

'  let  his  page 
Which  charms  the  chosen  spirits  of  the  time 
Fold  itself  up  for  the  serener  clime 
Of  years  to  come,  and  find  its  recompense 
In  that  just  expectation.' 

His  learned  wit,  his  satire  upon  the  vulgarity  of  progress,  are 
more  continuously  present  in  his  prose  than  in  his  verse ;  but 
the  novels  are  filled  with  cheerful  scraps  of  rhyming,  wine- 
songs,  love-songs,  songs  of  mockery,  and  nonsense  jingles, 
some  of  which  are  no  more  than  the  scholar's  idle  diversions, 
but  others  of  a  singular  excellence.  They  are  like  no  other 
verse;  they  are  startling,  grotesque,  full  of  hearty  extrava- 
gances, at  times  thrilling  with  unexpected  beauty.  The  mas- 
terpiece, perhaps,  of  the  comically  heroic  section  of  these 
poems  is  'The  War-Song  of  Dinas  Vawr,'  which  is,  as  the 
author  says  in  due  commendation  of  it,  'the  quintessence  of 
all  war-songs  that  ever  were  written,  and  the  sum  and  sub- 

1  (1)  Palmyra,  1806.   (2)  The  Genius  of  the  Thames,  1810.  (3)   Rhodo- 
daphne,  1818.  (4)  Paper  Money  Lyrics,  privately  printed,  1825. 


JOHN  WILSON  231 

stance  of  all  the  appetencies,  tendencies,  and  consequences  of 
military.'  Is  there  any  casual  reader  who  has  ever  been  able 
to  put  out  of  his  head  the  divinely  droll  first  lines :  — 

'The  mountain  sheep  are  sweeter, 
But  the  valley  sheep  are  fatter; 
We  therefore  deemed  it  meeter 
To  carry  off  the  latter.' 

Was  comic  verse  ever  more  august?  And  of  wine-songs  is 
there  any,  outside  Burns  (and  with  how  great  a  difference!), 
in  which  a  poetic  decorum  dignifies  revel  more  effectually 
than  in  the  refrain :  — 

'  And  our  ballast  is  old  wine, 
And  your  ballast  is  old  wine'? 

There  is  another  after-dinner  ballad,  'In  life  three  ghostly 
friars  were  we,'  and  a  '  Hail  to  the  Headlong,'  mere  cataract 
of  sound,  as  'The  Three  Little  Men'  and  the  chorus  of  'Our 
balances,  our  balances'  are  afterwards  to  be,  in  the  later 
parodies  of  politics:  all  these  have  their  place  among  Pea- 
cock's cleverest  ingenuities.  When  he  is  serious  and  lengthy, 
as  in  the  'Rhododaphne,'  which  Shelley  thought  worth  liking, 
every  poetical  quality  deserts  him  except  a  faint  and  ineffect- 
ual eloquence.  But  there  are  two  lyrics  of  a  delicate  tender- 
ness, '  In  the  Days  of  Old'  and  '  Love  and  Age,'  in  which  he  is 
content  to  remember  the  past  and  to  sing  from  memory  out  of 
a  lover's  experience. 


JOHN  WILSON  (17S5-1S41)  " 

Wilson  left  minor  poems  in  which  he  tries  to  be  a  'Lake- 
poet,'  even  writing  lines  on  an  ass,  though  on  an  Ass  in  a 
Dutch  picture.    Much  of  the  verse  is  almost  as  prettified  as 

1  (1)  The  Isle  of  Palms,  1812.  (2)  The  City  of  the  Plague,  1816.  (3)  Works, 
1855-58. 


232     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

that  of  Thomas  Moore,  though  the  sentiment  of  it  is  better. 
None  of  the  reflections  on  the  subjects  of  the  day,  ruined 
abbeys,  the  banks  of  Windermere,  moonlight  at  sea,  midnight 
on  Helm  Crag,  the  voice  of  departed  friendship,  can  now  be 
read  with  any  attention.  The  continual  faint  fancy  of  these 
and  of  the  long  poem,  'The  Isle  of  Palms,'  which  is  too  thin  a 
cobweb  for  a  spider  to  hang  by,  wearies  the  reader  who  asks 
for  imagination.  The  longest  poem  of  all,  'The  City  of  the 
Plague,'  a  rhapsody  divided  into  acts  and  scenes,  is  one  of  the 
weakest  and  most  lavish  pieces  of  sensational  extravagance  in 
our  language,  much  fiercer  and  feebler  than  anything  in  the 
Elizabethan  tragedy  of  blood.  Beddoes  might  have  made 
something,  within  a  brief  space,  of  this  nightmare  subject,  but 
there  is  none  of  his  mastery  of  the  grotesque  in  this  long 
eloquent  raving,  these  'horrid  demons  in  a  dream.'  'The 
Convict,'  which  is  shorter,  and  aims  at  a  kind  of  realism, 
though  it  is  nearly  as  horrible,  has  some  of  the  merit  of  melo- 
drama. But  whether  we  are  served,  as  in  the  minor  poems, 
with  sighs,  or,  in  these  lengthy  compositions,  with  yells,  there 
is  an  equal  failure  to  make  any  articulate  form  of  art  out  of 
either.  Everything  that  is  superficial  and  second-rate  in  the 
'Noctes  Ambrosianae,'  their  haste  and  heat,  are  here;  but  no 
more  than  a  glimpse  of  the  qualities  to  which  Christopher 
North  owes  a  name  better  known  than  his  own. 


SIR  AUBREY  DE  VERE   (1786-1846)  • 

Wordsworth  said  of  the  sonnets  of  Sir  Aubrey  de  Vere  that 
they  were  '  among  the  most  perfect  of  our  age ' ;  and  the  author, 
in  dedicating  them  to  him,  hoped  'to  be  named  hereafter  as 
one  among  the  friends  of  Wordsworth.'  Not  always  perfect 
as  sonnets,  they  have  often  both  intellectual  symmetry  and 
moral  distinction;  many  of  them  are  'trophies,'   resonant 

1  (1)  Julian  the  Apostate,  1822.  (2)  The  Duke  of  Mercia,  1823.  (3)  The 
Song  of  Faith,  1842.   (4)  Mary  Tudor,  1847. 


CAROLINE  ANNE  BOWLES  SOUTHEY         233 

with  the  clarions  of  Crusaders,  and  with  homages  and  con- 
demnations of  kings.  There  is  in  some  of  them,  not  least  in 
such  religious  ones  as  that  on  'Universal  Prayer,'  a  noble 
Wordsworthian  quality,  worthy  of  Wordsworth's  praise. 


CAROLINE    ANNE    BOWLES    SOUTHEY   (1786-1854)  » 

The  poems  of  Mrs.  Southey,  now  as  forgotten  as  her  hus- 
band's, are  of  a  far  finer  quality.  They  show  the  continual 
influence  of  Wordsworth,  but  at  its  best  the  influence  passes 
almost  into  personal  creation.  She  is  full  of  gentle  meditation 
over  passing  things,  flowers  and  animals,  above  all,  dogs, 
and  there  is  a  genuinely  womanly  quality  in  her  poems,  full 
of  tenderness  and  quiet  observation.  Often  a  phrase  has  fine 
precision,  as  in :  — 

'  Finding  thine  own  distress 
With  accurate  greediness.' 

The  lyrics,  though  they  tend  to  become  monotonous,  are  more 
than  facile;  they  have  often  a  distinction  of  a  personal  kind. 
There  is  no  strong  emotion  in  them,  but  delicate  insight, 
natural  simplicity,  a  choiceness  of  phrase  and  cadence.  A 
long  poem  in  blank  verse,  which  has  almost  a  suggestion  of 
Jane  Austen  in  its  slightly  formal  detail,  is  written  in  a  style 
of  easy  colloquialism  which  seems  midway  between  the  verse 
of  'The  Prelude'  and  that  of  'Aurora  Leigh.'  Lines  like  these 
might  almost  have  been  found  in  '  Bishop  Blougram  ' :  — 

'True,  they  seem  starving;  but  't  is  also  true 
The  parish  sees  to  all  those  vulgar  wants ; 
And  when  it  does  not,  doubtless  there  must  be  — 
Alas !  too  common  in  this  wicked  world  — 
Some  artful  imposition  in  the  case.' 

Caroline  Southey  was  an  artist,  and  has  been  undeservedly 
forgotten. 

1  (1)  Ellen  Fitzarthur,  1820.  (2)  The  Widow's  Tale,  1822.  (3)  Tales  of 
the  Factories,  1823.  (4)  Solitary  Hours,  prose  and  verse,  1826.  (5)  The 
Birthday,  1836. 


234     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


GEORGE  BEATTIE   (1786-1823)  » 

George  Beattie  was  a  crofter's  son,  who,  having  fallen  in 
love  with  a  woman  who  had  encouraged  him  until  she  came 
into  some  money,  '  died  of  despair,'  his  strange  biographer,  a 
Mr.  Mt.  Cyrus,  tells  us.  The  last  confession  which  he  wrote 
before  going  out  to  shoot  himself  ('a  dying  man  may  surely 
be  allowed  to  state  what  he  believed  or  rather  knew  to  be  the 
fact ')  is  a  document  of  value  in  the  study  of  human  nature. 
We  see,  in  the  incoherent  assurances,  the  wild,  scarcely  sane 
excitement  of  a  man  brooding  over  'the  deep  and  indelible 
wrongs '  done  to  him.  Most  of  his  poems  are  personal,  and 
delineate  bad  dreams,  or  shipwreck,  or  the  scene  of  murder; 
but  there  are  one  or  two  lyrics,  like  the  '  Fragment '  with  the 
refrain  '  Igo  and  ago,'  which  have  a  lilt  of  their  own.  His  best 
work  was  the  ballad  of  'John  O'Arnha,'  done  under  the  in- 
fluence of  Burns ;  there  is  a  wild  hurrying  fancy  in  it,  tossed 
about  by  weird  demons,  'grisly  ghaists,'  and  'whinnering  gob- 
lins ' ;  '  a  waesome,  wan,  wanliesum  sight ! '  The  verse  gallops 
like  a  witch  on  her  broomstick,  riding  against  the  wind. 


MARY  RUSSELL  MITFORD  (1787-1855)  2 

Miss  Mitford  tells  us  that  the  need  of  making  money  '  made 
it  a  duty  to  turn  away  from  the  lofty  steep  of  Tragic  Poetry 
to  the  every-day  path  of  Village  Stories.'  We  may  have 
gained,  in  getting '  Our  Village,'  but  there  is  a  nearer  approach 
to  both  poetry  and  drama  in  the  plays,  now  completely  for- 

1  George  Beattie,  of  Montrose,  a  Poet,  a  Humourist,  and  a  Man  of 
Genius,  by  A.  S.  Mt.  Cyrus,  M.  A.,  no  date  [1863?]. 

2  (1)  Poems,  1810.  (2)  Christina,  1811.  (3)  Blanche  of  Castile,  1812. 
(4)  Watlington  Hill,  1812.  (5)  Narrative  Poems  on  Female  Characters, 
1813.  (6)  Julian,  1823.  (7)  Foscari,  1826.  (8)  Rienzi,  1828.  (9)  Charles 
I, 1834.  (10)  Sadak  and  Kalasrade,  1836.  (11)  Dramatic  Works,  2  vols., 
1854. 


MARY  RUSSELL  MITFORD  235 

gotten,  than  most  people  are  likely  to  imagine.  The  most 
serious  of  them  is  'Charles  I,'  which  George  Colman,  then 
Censor,  would  not  allow  to  be  acted.  There  was  no  danger 
to  the  state  in  it,  and  it  has  some  fine  characterisation,  to- 
gether with  dignified  and  pathetic  speech.  In  several  of  the 
other  plays  the  action  is  allowed  to  run  quite  wild,  and  pre- 
posterous horrors  traverse  the  stage  in  an  almost  artless  pro- 
fusion. What  is  curious  is,  that  even  in  scenes  of  chaotic  im- 
possibility, there  is  a  certain  kind  of  human  feeling  which 
comes  through  a  thin  and  uncertain  verse,  which  can  pass  un- 
consciously from  such  dreadful  dissonances  as :  — 

'  That  on  a  point  of  time  so  brief,  that  scarce 
The  sand  wags  in  the  hour-glass,  hangs  man's  all,' 

to  so  assured  a  cadence  as :  — 

1  The  mind  of  man 
When  fashioning  the  myriad  sounds  that  lend 
A  winged  life  to  thought,  ne'er  framed  a  name 
For  the  slayer  of  his  children.' 

The  people  are  for  the  most  part  martyrs,  fanatics,  parricides, 
always  headstrong,  often  light-hearted  in  the  midst  of  disas- 
ters partly  of  their  causing;  and  the  action  turns  generally 
about  a  tangle  of  unlikely  crimes.  These  unnatural  deeds, 
which  were  meant  to  create  a  vivid  drama,  defeat  the  nature 
in  the  words  of  characters  whose  speech  is  often  so  probable. 
It  is  all  a  woman's  world,  a  kind  of  soft  and  touching,  some- 
times thrilling  melodrama.  The  people,  in  the  midst  of  con- 
fusions and  catastrophes,  are  intensely  alert,  and  their  frenzies 
are  often  touched  by  a  kind  of  irrelevant  and  not  quite 
achieved  beauty.  You  feel  behind  them  a  capable,  enthusias- 
tic woman,  writing  too  loosely,  with  too  feminine  a  sense  of 
romance,  but  not  without  a  natural  impulse,  a  ready  and 
human  eloquence. 


236    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

BRYAN    WALLER    PROCTER:      BARRY  CORNWALL 

(1787-1874)  * 

When  Leigh  Hunt  reviewed  the  '  Lamia '  volume  of  Keats  in 
the  'Examiner/  in  the  summer  of  1820,  he  did  not  think  it 
necessary  to  tell  the  story  of  'Isabella/  as  the  public  had 
'lately  been  familiarized  with  it  in  the  "Sicilian  Story"  of 
Mr.  Barry  Cornwall.'  How  lately,  we  know  from  a  letter  of 
Keats  to  Reynolds,  at  the  end  of  February,  1820,  in  which  he 
says  that  Barry  Cornwall  has  sent  him  not  only  his  '  Sicilian 
Story/  but  his  'Dramatic  Scenes.'  'I  confess  they  tease  me/ 
he  says;  'they  are  composed  of  amiability,  the  Seasons,  the 
Leaves,  the  Moon,  etc.,  upon  which  he  rings  (according  to 
Hunt's  expression)  triple  bob  majors.  However  that  is  nothing 
—  I  think  he  likes  poetry  for  its  own  sake,  not  his.'  The 
'  Sicilian  Story  '  is  a  faint,  pretty  telling,  rather  in  the  manner 
of  Leigh  Hunt,  of  the  story  out  of  Boccaccio  which  Keats 
had  been  telling  in  his  own  way.  The  difference  between  them 
may  be  sufficiently  indicated  by  Barry  Cornwall's  note:  'I 
have  ventured  to  substitute  the  heart  for  the  head  of  the  lover. 
The  latter  appeared  to  me  to  be  a  ghastly  object  to  preserve.' 
In  the  same  volume  is  an  equally  faint,  but  not  even  pretty, 
Spanish  tale  done  after  Byron  in  ottava  rima.  Of  this  poem 
Shelley  wrote  to  Peacock:  'The  man  whose  critical  gall  is 
not  stirred  up  by  such  ottava  rima  as  Barry  Cornwall's,  may 
safely  be  conjectured  to  possess  no  gall  at  all.  The  world  is 
pale  with  the  sickness  of  such  stuff.'  'Marcian  Colonna,' 
which  preceded  'A  Sicilian  Story/  is  indistinguishable  from 
it  in  manner;  both  are  the  kind  of  work  which  follows  closely 
upon  good  originals,  and  often  gets  the  earliest  credit;  for 
Byron  is  in  the  story,  and  Leigh  Hunt  and  Keats  are  both  in 

1  (1)  Dramatic  Scenes,  1819.  (2)  A  Sicilian  Story,  1820.  (3)  Marcian 
Colonna,  1820.  (4)  Mirandola,  1821.  (5)  Poetical  Works,  3  vols.,  1822. 
(6)  The  Flood  in  Thessaly,  1823.    (7)  English  Songs,  1832. 


BARRY  CORNWALL  237 

the  style.  In  the  same  volume  there  is  a  curious  fragment  in 
modern  drama,  called  '  Ametra  Wentworth/  which  in  its  at- 
tempt at  a  kind  of  plaintive  realism  may  have  filled  some 
intermediate  gap  between  the  romantic  group  and  Tennyson. 
1  Mirandola '  followed,  and  was  acted,  and  had  its  success,  as 
everything  of  Barry  Cornwall  had,  for  its  moment.  The  par- 
ticular dim  echo  which  he  contrived  to  get  from  the  Eliza- 
bethan drama,  which  Lamb  had  not  so  long  ago  revealed  to 
the  poets  of  that  time,  seemed  to  give  out  a  real  music,  and 
the  tune  was  easy  to  follow.  When  that  tune  turned  to  the 
borrowed  but  easier  jig  of  the  'English  Songs,'  Barry  Cornwall 
seemed  to  have  found  his  place  among  English  poets. 

'Taken  altogether/  said  Lamb,  of  the  'English  Songs/ 
'  't  is  too  Lovey ' ;  but  he  immediately  qualifies  this  good 
criticism  by  adding :  '  But  what  delicacies ! '  And  he  names 
his  favourites,  of  which  one  is  'glorious  'bove  all.'  If  we  read 
the  particular  songs  which  Lamb  liked  we  shall  see  perhaps  a 
kind  of  novelty,  or  what  was  a  novelty  in  1832,  and  must  re- 
member that  it  is  not  always  easy  to  appreciate  such  things 
immediately  at  their  true  value.  The  songs  are  indeed  'too 
Lovey ' ;  they  are  also  as  much  too  diluted  in  sentiment  as  they 
are  too  carelessly  improvised  in  form.  Such  music  as  is  in 
them  is  rarely  more  than  a  child's  forefinger  could  pick  out  on 
a  piano.  It  has  been  let  out  by  candid  friends  that  they  have 
no  personal  sincerity;  but  this  is  a  secondary  matter,  for  such 
a  song  as  '  The  sea !  the  sea !  the  open  sea ! '  is  not  more  worth- 
less as  a  poem  because  the  author  was  only  once  on  the  sea, 
and  was  then  seasick.  Sincerity  to  his  art  is  what  was  not  in 
Barry  Cornwall ;  he  liked  it,  as  Keats  said,  for  its  own  sake,  but 
his  liking  was  far  too  platonic  ever  to  become  creative. 

Few  writers  were  more  loved  in  their  own  day,  or  more 
quickly  forgotten,  than  Barry  Cornwall.  Praised  by  Landor, 
who  said :  — 

'  No  other  in  these  later  times 
Has  bound  me  in  so  potent  rhymes,' 


238    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  by  Mr.  Swinburne  in  a  lovely  elegy,  there  is  scarcely  one 

of  his  contemporaries  who  did  not  know  and  like  him,  and  few 

who  did  not  confuse  that  personal  liking  with  literary  esteem. 

When  the  last  of  his  friends  is  gone,  will  any  one  have  a  good 

word  to  say  for  him?   In  the  course  of  a  long  life  he  went 

through  many  schools  and  periods  of  poetry;  all  left  their 

influence  on  him,  and  some  sympathetic,  attaching  quality 

in  him  caught  up  the  hints  from  one  which  he  seems  to  have 

passed  on  to  another.  He  accompanies  the  general  movement, 

and  it  is  instructive  to  see  one  who  began  with  pale  romantic 

elegances  falling  at  last  into  the  clash  and  colloquialism  of 

Browning.    He  speaks  with  affection  of  'Landor's  verse  and 

Browning's  rhyme/  and  he  imitated  the  very  tricks  of  both : 

Browning  badly  and  with  almost  an  anticipation  of  Robert 

Buchanan;  Landor,  in  perhaps  his  best  piece  of  verse,  an 

'Inscription  for  a  Fountain,'  to  better  effect.   It  is  not  at  all 

certain  that  there  are  not  suggestions  in  his  work  which  may 

have  affected  later  and  greater  men,  as  what  is  worthless  in 

itself  has  a  way  of  doing.  I  should  be  surprised  if  the  opening 

lines  of  a  poem  of  Browning,  published  in  1845 :  — 

'  I  've  a  friend  over  the  sea, 
I  like  him  but  he  loves  me,' 

did  not  come  into  his  head,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  as 

an  echo   of  some  doggerel  of  Barry  Cornwall,  published  in 

1832,  which  begins  — 

'I've  a  friend  who  loveth  me, 
And  sendeth  me  Ale  of  Trinitie.' 

And  it  is  not  less  possible  that  some  of  the  crudest  of  Mr. 
Swinburne's  '  Poems  and  Ballads '  owed,  for  all  their  magnifi- 
cence, a  certain  impulse  to  the  showy  attempts  to  be  dramati- 
cally and  passionately  lyrical  which  we  find  in  some  of  Barry 
Cornwall's  later  work.  Anticipation  or  imitation,  it  matters 
little  to  us  now;  but  if  Barry  Cornwall  really  did  throw  out 
hints  to  others,  incapable  as  he  was  of  realising  them  himself, 
the  fact  may  explain  some  of  the  pleasant  things  which  were 
said  about  him. 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON     239 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON  (1788-1824)  * 

The  life  of  Byron  was  a  masque  in  action,  to  which  his  poetry- 
is  but  the  moralising  accompaniment  of  words.  'One  whose 
dust  was  once  all  fire '  (words  which  Byron  used  of  Rousseau, 
and  which  may  still  more  truthfully  be  used  of  himself ),  Byron 
still  lives  for  us  with  such  incomparable  vividness  because 
he  was  a  man  first  and  a  poet  afterwards.  He  became  a  poet 
for  that  reason,  and  that  reason  explains  the  imperfection  of 
his  poetry.  Most  of  his  life  he  was  a  personality  looking  out 
for  its  own  formula,  and  his  experiments  upon  that  search 
were  of  precisely  the  kind  to  thrill  the  world.  What  poet  ever 
had  so  splendid  a  legend  in  his  lifetime?  His  whole  life  was 
lived  in  the  eyes  of  men,  and  Byron  had  enough  of  the  actor 
in  him  to  delight  in  that  version  of  '  all  the  world  's  a  stage.' 
His  beauty  and  his  deformity,  his  'tenderness,  roughness, 
delicacy,  coarseness,  sentiment,  sensuality,  soaring  and  grovel- 
ling, dirt  and  deity,  all  mixed  up  in  that  one  compound  of 
inspired  clay'  (it  is  his  own  summary  of  Burns),  worked  to- 
gether with  circumstances  to  move  every  heart  to  admiration 
and  pity.  He  was  a  poet,  and  he  did  what  others  only  wrote ; 

1  (1)  Poems  on  Various  Occasions,  1807.  (2)  Hours  of  Idleness,  1807. 
(3)  English  Bards  and  Scottish  Reviewers,  1809.  (4)  Childe  Harold,  a 
Romaunt,  1812.  (5)  The  Curse  of  Minerva,  1812.  (6)  The  Waltz,  1813. 
(7)  The  Giaour,  1813.  (8)  The  Bride  of  Abydos,  1813.  (9)  The  Corsair, 
1814.  (10)  Ode  to  Napoleon,  1814.  (11)  Lara,  with  Rogers'  Jacqueline, 
1814.  (12)  Hebrew  Melodies,  1815.  (13)  The  Siege  of  Corinth,  1816. 
(14)  Parisina,  1816.  (15)  Poems,  1816.  (16)  The  Prisoner  of  Chillon, 
1816.  (17)  Childe  Harold's  Pilgrimage,  Canto  III,  1816.  (18)  Monody 
on  the  Death  of  Sheridan,  1816.  (19)  Manfred,  1817.  (20)  The  Lament 
of  Tasso,  1817.  (21)  Childe  Harold's  Pilgrimage,  Canto  IV,  1818.  (22) 
Beppo,  a  Venetian  Story,  1818.  (23)  Mazeppa,  1819.  (24)  Marino 
Faliero,  1820.  (25)  The  Prophecy  of  Dante,  1821.  (26)  Sardanapalus, 
The  Two  Foscari,  Cain,  1821.  (27)  Werner,  1822.  (28)  The  Age  of  Bronze, 
1823.  (29)  The  Island,  1823.  (30)  The  Deformed  Transformed,  1824. 
(31)  Don  Juan,  Cantos  I,  II,  1819;  Cantos  III,  IV,  V,  1821;  Cantos  VI, 
VII,  VIII,  1823;  Cantos  IX,  X,  XI,  1823;  Cantos  XII,  XIII,  XIV,  1823; 
Cantos  XV,  XVI,  1824. 


240     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

he  seemed  to  write  what  others  dared  not  think.  It  was  a 
romantic  time,  'gigantic  and  exaggerated/  as  he  said,  the 
age  of  the  French  Revolution,  the  age  of  Napoleon ;  Trafalgar 
and  Waterloo  were  contemporary  moments.  The  East  was 
the  new  playground  of  the  imagination:  Byron,  and  Byron 
alone  of  the  Orientalising  poets,  had  been  there.  He  was  a 
peer  and  a  republican,  at  twenty-four  the  most  famous  poet 
of  the  day,  the  idol  of  one  London  season  and  cast  out  with 
horror  by  the  next,  an  exile  from  his  country,  equally  con- 
demned and  admired,  credited  with  abnormal  genius  and 
abnormal  wickedness,  confessing  himself  defiantly  to  the 
world,  making  a  public  show  of  a  very  genuine  misery,  living 
with  ostentatious  wildness  in  Venice,  reclaimed  to  a  kind  of 
irregular  domesticity,  giving  up  everything,  life  itself,  in  the 
cause  of  liberty  and  for  a  nation  with  a  tradition  of  heroes, 
a  hero  in  death;  and  he  was  one  whom  Scott  could  sum  up, 
as  if  speaking  for  England,  at  the  news  of  that  death,  as  '  that 
mighty  genius,  which  walked  amongst  us  as  something  su- 
perior to  ordinary  mortality,  and  whose  powers  were  beheld 
with  wonder,  and  something  approaching  to  terror,  as  if  we 
knew  not  whether  they  were  of  good  or  evil.' 

Circumstances  made  Byron  a  poet;  he  became  the  poet  of 
circumstance.  But  with  Byron,  remember,  a  circumstance  was 
an  emotion;  the  idealist  of  real  things,  and  an  imperfect 
idealist,  never  without  a  certain  suspicion  of  his  ideal,  he 
turned  life,  as  it  came  to  him,  into  an  impossible  kind  of  ro- 
mance, invented  by  one  who  was  romantic  somewhat  in  the 
sense  that  a  man  becomes  romantic  when  he  loves.  Such  an 
experience  does  not  change  his  nature;  it  does  not  give  him 
sincerity  in  romance.  Byron's  sincerity  underlies  his  romance, 
does  not  transmute  it.  This  is  partly  because  the  style  is  the 
man ;  and  Byron  had  not  style,  through  which  alone  emotion 
can  prove  its  own  sincerity.  '  All  convulsions  end  with  me  in 
rhyme,'  he  writes ;  and  all  through  his  letters  we  see  the  fit 
working  itself  out.   'I  wish  I  could  settle  to  reading  again/  he 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON 

notes  in  his  journal ; '  my  life  is  monotonous,  and  yet  d 
I  take  up  my  books  and  fling  them  down  again.  I  bt^ 
comedy,  and  burnt  it  because  the  scene  ran  into  reality 
novel  for  the  same  reason.  In  rhyme  I  can  keep  more  away 
from  facts ;  but  the  thought  always  runs  through  .  .  .  yes,  yes, 
through.'  Convinced  that  'the  great  object  of  life  is  sensation 
—  to  feel  that  we  exist,  even  though  in  pain/  Byron  was  con- 
stantly satisfying  himself  of  the  latter  part  of  his  conviction. 
Rhyme  was  at  once  the  relief  and  the  expression;  and,  in  his 
verse,  we  see  the  confusion  of  that  double  motive.  'To  with- 
draw myself  from  myself  —  oh,  that  cursed  selfishness  —  has 
ever  been  my  sole,  my  entire,  my  sincere  motive  in  scribbling 
at  all.'  Now  this  conflict  between  the  fact  which  insists  on 
coming  with  the  emotion,  and  the  alien  kind  of  fact  which 
presents  itself  as  an  escape  from  the  emotion,  does  much  to 
render  Byron's  earlier  poetry  formless,  apparently  insincere. 
Byron  wrote  with  a  contempt  for  writing; '  managing  his  pen,' 
in  Scott's  phrase  which  has  become  famous,  'with  the  careless 
and  negligent  ease  of  a  man  of  quality.'  'God  help  him!'  he 
writes  of  a  gentleman  who  has  published  a  book  of  verses ; '  no 
one  should  be  a  rhymer  who  could  be  anything  better.'  And 
again,  more  deliberately : '  I  by  no  means  rank  poetry  or  poets 
high  in  the  scale  of  intellect.  This  may  look  like  affectation, 
but  it  is  my  real  opinion.  It  is  the  lava  of  the  imagination, 
whose  eruption  prevents  an  earthquake.  ...  I  prefer  the 
talents  of  action.' 

'The  lava  of  the  imagination,  whose  eruption  prevents  an 
earthquake,'  is  indeed  precisely  what  poetry  was  to  Byron; 
and  it  is  characteristic  of  him  that  he  cannot  look  beyond 
himself  even  for  the  sake  of  a  generalisation.  If  we  would 
define  yet  more  precisely  his  ideal  we  must  turn  to  a  certain 
stanza  in  '  Childe  Harold ' :  — 

'  Could  I  embody  and  unbosom  now 
That  which  is  most  within  me,  —  could  I  wreak 
My  thoughts  upon  expression,  and  thus  throw 


:^ANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

—  heart  —  mind  —  passions  —  feelings  —  strong  or  weak  — 
that  I  would  have  sought,  and  all  I  seek, 
xJear  —  know  —  feel  —  and  yet  breathe  —  into  one  word, 
And  that  one  word  were  Lightning,  I  would  speak'; 

and  so,  indeed,  at  his  best,  he  did  speak,  condensing  the  in- 
dignation of  his  soul  or  the  wrath  of  Europe  into  one  word, 
and  that  word  lightning.  But  the  word  flashes  out  intermit- 
tently from  among  the  dreariest  clouds,  and  he  is  not  even 
sure  whether  his  lightning  has  flashed  or  not,  waiting  to 
know  whether  it  has  been  seen  before  he  has  any  positive 
opinion  of  his  own.  Sending  the  manuscript  of  '  Manfred '  to 
Murray,  he  writes : '  I  have  not  an  idea  if  it  is  good  or  bad.  .  .  . 
You  may  put  it  into  the  fire  if  you  like,  and  Gifford  don't  like.' 
He  sends  the  first  part  of  '  Heaven  and  Earth/  saying : '  I  wish 
the  first  part  to  be  published  before  the  second,  because  if  it 
don't  succeed  it  is  better  to  stop  there  than  to  go  on  in  a 
fruitless  experiment.'  Such  indifference,  partly  but  not 
wholly  pose  though  it  may  be,  such  dependence  on  outside 
judgements  and  the  mere  whim  of  the  public,  on  'success,' 
shows  us,  with  singular  clearness,  Byron's  lack  of  conviction, 
of  reverence,  of  serious  feeling  for  art.  It  brings  out  the  strain 
of  commonness  which  we  find  in  the  greatest  of  those  to  whom 
action  was  rnore#than  thought,  the  external  world  more  real 
than  the  inner  world ;  the  commonness  which  seems  to  be  part 
of  a  very  masculine  genius,  to  which  contemplation  has  not 
brought  the  female  complement  of  energy;  the  commonness 
which  made  Napoleon,  at  that  very  epoch,  fall  just  so  far  short 
of  greatness. 

Byron's  fame,  which  was  never,  like  that  of  every  other 
English  poet,  in  his  lifetime,  a  merely  English  reputation,  has 
been  kept  alive  in  other  countries,  more  persistently  than  in  our 
own,  and  comes  back  to  us  now  from  abroad  with  at  times 
almost  the  shock  of  a  new  discovery.  It  is  never  possible  to 
convince  a  foreigner  that  Byron  is  often  not  even  correct  as 
a  writer  of  verse.    His  lines,  so  full  of  a  kind  of  echoing 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON  243 

substance,  ring  true  to  the  ear  which  has  not  naturalised  itself 
in  English  poetry;  and,  hearing  them  march  so  directly  and 
with  such  obvious  clangour,  the  foreigner  is  at  a  loss  to  under- 
stand why  one  should  bring  what  seems  to  him  a  petty  charge 
against  them.  The  magic  of  words,  in  which  Byron  is  lacking, 
the  poverty  of  rhythm,  for  which  he  is  so  conspicuous,  do  not 
tell  with  any  certainty  through  the  veil  of  another  idiom.  How 
many  Englishmen  know  quite  how  bad,  as  verse,  is  the  verse 
of  the  French  Byron,  as  he  has  been  called,  Alfred  de  Musset, 
and  quite  why  it  is  bad?  And  as  Byron's  best  verse,  even 
more  than  Musset's,  is  worldly  verse,  it  is  still  more  difficult 
to  detect  a  failure  in  accent,  in  that  finer  part  of  what  Byron 
calls  'the  poetry  of  speech' ;  so  delicate  a  difference  separating 
what  may  be  almost  the  greatest  thing  in  poetry,  a  line  of 
Dante,  from  something,  like  too  much  of  Byron,  which  is 
commoner  than  the  commonest  prose. 

Byron's  theory  of  poetry  and  his  practice  were  two  very 
different  things,  both  faulty,  and  telling  against  one  another. 
His  theory  was  that  the  finest  English  poetry  is  to  be  found  in 
Pope :  |  what  I  firmly  believe  in  as  the  Christianity  of  English 
poetry,  the  poetry  of  Pope.'  Admitting  frankly  that  he  had 
not  followed  so  correct  a  master  with  any  sort  of  attention,  he 
apologised  on  the  ground  that  'it  is  easier  to  perceive  the 
wrong  than  to  pursue  the  right.'  'But  I  have  lived  in  far 
countries  abroad,'  he  tells  us,  'or  in  the  agitating  world  at 
home,  which  was  not  favourable  to  study  or  reflection,  so  that 
almost  all  I  have  written  has  been  mere  passion  —  passion,  it 
is  true,  of  different  kinds,  but  always  passion.'  And  he  adds: 
'  But  then  I  did  other  things  besides  write.' 

'We  are  all  wrong,  except  Rogers,  Crabbe,  and  Campbell,' 
he  laments,  going  on  his  own  way,  all  the  same,  for  good  and 
evil.  And  his  own  way,  until  he  accustomed  himself  frankly 
to  '  wandering  with  pedestrian  Muses,'  as  he  tells  us  in  '  Don 
-Juan,'  and  thus  adding  to  the  ground  a  splendour  which  he 
could  not  capture  from  the  skies,  was  a  very  uneven  way  with 


244     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

many  turnings.  '  My  qualities/  he  tells  us  of  his  school-days 
at  Harrow,  'were  much  more  oratorical  than  poetical,  and  Dr. 
Drury,  my  grand  patron,  had  a  great  notion  that  I  should  turn 
out  an  orator,  from  my  fluency,  my  turbulence,  my  voice,  my 
copiousness  of  declamation,  and  my  action.'  The  criticism 
justified  itself;  Byron's  qualities  in  verse  are  indeed  'much 
more  oratorical  than  poetical ' ;  and,  in  all  his  earlier  work, 
theory  accentuated  this  natural  tendency  so  fatally  that  we 
have  to  scrape  off  a  great  deal  of  false  glitter  if  we  are  to  find 
the  good  metal  which  is  often  enough  to  be  found,  even  in  the 
metrical  romances,  with  their  pseudo-romance,  founded  on 
direct  observation,  their  pseudo-passion,  doing  injustice  to 
a  really  passionate  nature,  their  impossible  heroes,  not  with- 
out certain  touches  of  just  self-portraiture,  their  impossible 
heroines,  betraying  after  all  a  certain  first-hand  acquaintance 
with  the  '  dreadful  heart  of  woman.'  In  narrative  verse  Byron 
finally  made  for  himself  a  form  of  his  own  which  exactly  suited 
him,  but  in  lyrical  verse  he  never  learnt  to  do  much  that  he 
could  not  already  do  in  the  'Hours  of  Idleness.'  His  'last 
lines '  are  firmer  in  measure,  graver  in  substance,  but  they  are 
written  on  exactly  the  same  principle  as  the  '  Well !  thou  art 
happy'  of  1808.  There  is  the  same  strained  simplicity  of 
feeling,  in  which  a  really  moved  directness  comes  through  the 
traditional  rhetoric  of  the  form.  Every  stanza  says  something, 
and  it  says  exactly  what  he  means  it  to  say,  without  any  of  the 
exquisite  evasions  of  a  more  purely  poetic  style ;  without,  too, 
any  of  the  qualifying  interruptions  of  a  more  subtle  tempera- 
ment. Byron's  mind  was  without  subtlety ;  whatever  he  felt  he 
felt  without  reservations,  or  the  least  thinking  about  feeling: 
hence  his  immediate  hold  upon  the  average  man  or  woman, 
who  does  not  need  to  come  to  his  verse,  as  the  verse  of  most 
other  poets  must  be  approached,  with  a  mind  already  pre- 
pared for  that  communion.  There  is  force,  clearness,  but  no 
atmosphere;  everything  is  seen  detached,  a  little  bare,  very 
distinct,  in  a  strong  light  without  shadows. 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON  245 

In  studying  Byron  one  is  always  face  to  face  with  the 
question:  Can  intention,  in  art,  ever  excuse  performance? 
Can  (one  is  tempted  to  say)  the  sum  of  a  number  of  noughts 
arrive  at  an  appreciable  figure?  Wordsworth  wearies  us  by 
commonplace  of  thought  and  feeling,  by  nervelessness  of 
rhythm,  by  a  deliberate  triviality;  Coleridge  offers  us  meta- 
physics for  poetry;  Browning  offers  us  busy  thinking  about 
life  for  meditation ;  there  is  not  a  scene  in  Shakespeare  which 
is  perfect  as  a  scene  of  Sophocles  is  perfect;  but  with  Byron 
the  failure  is  not  exceptional,  it  is  constant;  it  is  like  the 
speech  of  a  man  whose  tongue  is  too  large  for  his  mouth. 
There  are  indeed  individual  good  lines  in  Byron,  a  great 
number  of  quite  splendid  lines,  though  none  indeed  of  the  very 
finest  order  of  poetry;  but  there  is  not  a  single  poem,  not  a 
single  passage  of  the  length  of  'Kubla  Khan/  perhaps  not  a 
single  stanza,  which  can  be  compared  as  poetry  with  a  poem 
or  passage  or  stanza  of  Keats  or  Shelley,  such  as  any  one  will 
find  by  merely  turning  over  the  pages  of  those  poets  for  five 
minutes  at  random.  What  is  not  there  is  precisely  the  magic 
which  seems  to  make  poetry  its  finer  self,  the  perfume  of  the 
flower,  that  by  which  the  flower  is  remembered,  after  its  petals 
have  dropped  or  withered.  Even  Browning  abandons  himself 
at  times  to  the  dream  which  floats,  musically  or  in  soft  colour, 
through  the  senses  of  his  mind.  But  Byron,  when  he  meditates, 
meditates  with  fixed  attention;  if  he  dreams,  he  dreams 
with  open  eyes,  to  which  the  darkness  is  aglow  with  tumul- 
tuous action ;  he  is  at  the  mercy  of  none  of  those  wandering 
sounds,  delicate  spirits  of  the  air,  which  come  entreating  their 
liberty  from  the  indefinite,  in  the  releasing  bondage  of  song. 
He  has  certain  things  to  say,  he  has  certain  impulses  to  em- 
body; he  has,  first,  a  certain  type  of  character,  then  a  view 
of  the  world  which  is  more  obviously  the  prose  than  the  poetic 
view  of  the  world,  but  certainly  a  wide  view,  to  express ;  and 
it  remains  for  him,  in  this  rejection  or  lack  of  all  the  lesser 
graces,  to  be  either  Michael  Angelo  or  Benjamin  Haydon. 


246     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Or,  at  least,  so  it  would  seem ;  and  yet,  so  it  does  not  seem 
to  be.  Byron  is  not  Michael  Angelo,  not  merely  because  his 
conceptions  were  not  as  great  as  Michael  Angelo's,  but  because 
he  had  not  the  same  power  of  achieving  his  conceptions,  be- 
cause he  had  not  the  same  technical  skill.  When  Michael 
Angelo  left  great  naked  vestiges  of  the  rock  still  clinging  about 
the  emerging  bodies  of  his  later  sculpture,  it  was  not  because 
he  could  not  finish  them  with  the  same  ivory  smoothness  as 
the  'Pieta'  in  St.  Peter's;  it  was  because  he  had  found  out  all 
the  art  of  man's  visible  body,  and  had  apprehended  that  deeper 
breathing  of  the  spirit  of  life,  which  is  in  the  body,  yet  which 
is  not  the  body ;  and  was  caught  in  the  agony  of  the  last  con- 
flict with  the  last  mystery.  To  leave  an  appealing  or  terrify- 
ing or  lamentable  incompleteness,  where  before  there  had  been 
the  clear  joy  of  what  is  finished  and  finite:  there,  precisely, 
was  the  triumph  of  his  technique.  But  Byron  is  not  Haydon, 
because  he  is  not  a  small  man  struggling  to  be  a  great  man, 
painting  large  merely  because  he  cannot  paint  small,  and 
creating  chaos  on  the  canvas  out  of  ambition  rather  than 
irresistible  impulse.  He  is  fundamentally  sincere,  which  is 
the  root  of  greatness ;  he  has  a  firm  hold  on  himself  and  on  the 
world ;  he  speaks  to  humanity  in  its  own  voice,  heightened  to 
a  pitch  which  carries  across  Europe.  No  poet  had  ever  seemed 
to  speak  to  men  so  directly,  and  it  was  through  this  directness 
of  his  vision  of  the  world,  and  of  his  speech  about  it,  that  he 
became  a  poet,  that  he  made  a  new  thing  of  poetry. 

Look,  for  instance,  at  his  epithets  and  at  his  statements, 
and  you  will  find,  whenever  he  is  at  his  best,  an  unparalleled 
justness  of  expression,  a  perfect  hitting  of  the  mark,  which 
will  sometimes  seem  rather  the  vigour  of  prose  than  the  more 
celestial  energy  of  poetry,  but  not  always.  When,  in  the 
'Vision  of  Judgment,'  George  III  is  brought  pompously  to  the 
gate  of  Heaven  and  is  seen  to  be  nothing  but 

'  An  old  man 
With  an  old  soul,  and  both  extremely  blind'; 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON  247 

when,  in  '  Childe  Harold/  Napoleon  is  seen 


'  With  a  deaf  heart  that  never  seemed  to  be 
A  listener  to  itself: 


when 


'  France  gets  drunk  with  blood  to  vomit  crime ' ; 

when  Cromwell 

'Hewed  the  throne  down  to  a  block'; 

when  history  is  defined  as  'the  Devil's  scripture,'  Rome  as  'the 
Niobe  of  nations,'  ivy  as  'the  garland  of  eternity';  when 
Castlereagh's  speeches  are  summed  up :  — 

1  Nor  even  a  sprightly  blunder's  spark  can  blaze 

From  that  Ixion  grindstone's  ceaseless  toil, 
That  turns  and  turns  to  give  the  world  a  notion 
Of  endless  torment  and  perpetual  motion'; 

there  is  at  least,  in  all  these  vivid  and  unforgettable  phrases,  a 
heat  of  truth  which  has  kindled  speech  into  a  really  imagina- 
tive fervour.  Seen  in  the  form  which  perhaps  more  immedi- 
ately impressed  the  world,  as  being  liker  to  the  world's  notion 
of  poetry  — 

'  Admire  —  exult  —  despise  —  laugh  —  weep  —  for  here 
There  is  such  matter  for  all  feeling:  Man!' 

it  is  sheer  rhetoric,  and,  for  all  its  measure  of  personal  sincerity, 
becomes  false  through  over  -  emphasis.  The  closer  Byron's 
writing  seems  to  come  to  prose  the  nearer  it  really  comes  to 
poetry,  because  it  comes  nearer  to  humanity  and  to  the  world, 
his  subject-matter,  which  appears  to  take  him  for  its  voice, 
rather  than  to  be  chosen  by  him  with  any  conscious  selection. 
Byron  loved  the  world  for  its  own  sake  and  for  good  and 
evil.  His  quality  of  humanity  was  genius  to  him,  and  stood 
to  him  in  the  place  of  imagination.  Whatever  is  best  in  his 
work  is  full  of  this  kind  of  raw  or  naked  humanity.  It  is  the 
solid  part  of  his  rhetoric,  and  is  what  holds  us  still  in  the  ap- 
parently somewhat  theatrical  addresses  to  the  Dying  Gladia- 


248    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

tor  and  the  like.  Speaking  straight,  in  'Don  Juan '  and  'The 
Vision  of  Judgment/  it  creates  almost  a  new  kind  of  poetry, 
the  poetry  of  the  world,  written  rebelliously,  but  on  its  own 
level,  by  a  man  to  whom  the  world  was  the  one  reality. 
Only  Byron,  and  not  Shelley,  could  lead  the  revolt  against 
custom  and  convention,  against  the  insular  spirit  of  England, 
because  to  Byron  custom  and  convention  and  the  insular  spirit 
were  so  much  more  actual  things.  Rage  first  made  him  a  poet : 
the  first  lines  of  verse  he  ever  wrote  were  written  at  the  age  of 
nine,  against  an  old  lady  whom  he  disliked;  and  when  the 
weak  and  insincere  sentimentalities  of  the  '  Hours  of  Idleness ' 
had  been  scourged  by  Brougham  in  the  'Edinburgh,'  it  was  a 
most  human  desire  for  revenge  which  stirred  him  instantly  into 
a  vigorous  satirist.  His  very  idealism  was  a  challenge  and  a 
recoil.  He  went  about  Europe  like  a  man  with  a  hazel  wand 
in  his  hand,  and  wherever  the  forked  branch  dipped,  living 
water  rose  to  him  out  of  the  earth.  Every  line  he  wrote  is  a 
reminiscence,  the  reminiscence  of  a  place  or  a  passion.  His 
mind  was  a  cracked  mirror,  in  which  everything  reflected  itself 
directly,  but  as  if  scarred.  His  mind  was  never  to  him  a 
kingdom,  but  always  part  of  the  tossing  democracy  of  human- 
kind. And  so,  having  no  inner  peace,  no  interior  vision,  he  was 
never  for  long  together  the  master  or  the  obedient  vassal  of  his 
imagination;  and  he  has  left  us  tumultuous  fragments,  in 
which  beauty  comes  and  goes  fitfully,  under  pained  disguises, 
or  like  a  bird  with  impatient  wings,  tethered  at  short  range 
to  the  ground.  <— 

Byron  was  at  once  the  victim  and  the  master  of  the  world. 
Two  enemies,  always  in  fierce  grapple  with  one  another,  yet 
neither  of  them  ever  thrown,  Byron  and  the  world  seem  to 
touch  at  all  points,  and  to  maintain  a  kind  of  equilibrium  by 
the  equality  of  their  strength.  To  Byron  life  itself  was  imagi- 
native, not  the  mere  raw  stuff  out  of  which  imagination  could 
shape  something  quite  different,  something  far  more  beautiful, 
but  itself,  its  common  hours,  the  places  he  passed  on  the  way, 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON 


249 


a  kind  of  poem  in  action.  All  his  verse  is  an  attempt  to  make 
his  own  poetry  out  of  fragments  of  this  great  poem  of  life, 
as  it  came  to  him  on  his  heedful  way  through  the  midst  of 
it.  All  Byron's  poetry  is  emphasis,  and  he  obtains  his  tre- 
mendous emphasis  by  a  really  impersonal  interest  in  the  cir- 
cumstances of  the  drama  which  he  knew  himself  to  be  acting. 
Building  entirely  on  his  personal,  his  directly  personal  emotion, 
he  never  allows  that  emotion  to  overpower  him.  He  makes  the 
most  of  it,  even  with  what  may  easily  pass  for  a  lack  of  sincer- 
ity, but  is  only  an  astonishing  way  of  recovering  himself  after 
an  abandonment  to  feeling.  Imagination  comes  to  him  as  self- 
control.  Himself  in  actual  life  the  least  controlled  of  men,  or 
controlled  only  with  a  violence  itself  excessive,  a  great  emer- 
gency always  found  him  quietly  ready  for  it,  from  that  first 
voyage  when  he  wrapped  himself  in  his  cloak  and  went  to  sleep 
on  the  deck  of  a  Turkish  vessel  in  danger  of  shipwreck,  to  the 
day  when  the  Greek  mutineers  broke  into  the  room  where  he 
lay  dying,  and  found  him  more  than  their  master.  This  manly 
quality  was  his  imagination;  the  quality  of  restraint  in  ex- 
tremity, which  he  has  praised  in  some  of  his  most  famous  lines, 
on  the  statue  of  the  Dying  Gladiator.  It  may  seem  to  be  the 
quality  of  a  man  rather  than  of  a  poet,  and  is  indeed  one  of 
the  reasons  why  without  Byron  the  man  no  one  would  have 
cared  for  Byron  the  poet.  But  it  is  more  than  this ;  it  becomes 
in  him  a  poetic  quality,  the  actual  imaginative  force  by  which 
he  dramatises  himself,  not  as  if  it  were  his  own  little  naked 
human  soul,  shiveringly  alone  with  God,  but  as  a  great  person- 
age, filling  the  world,  like  Napoleon,  and  seen  always  against 
a  background  of  all  the  actual  pomps  of  the  world. 

And  it  was  as  a  Napoleon,  'the  grand  Napoleon  of  the 
realms  of  rhyme/  that  he  filled  Europe,  as  no  other  poet  in 
the  history  of  literature  has  filled  Europe.  Famous  men  do  not 
always  choose  the  form  in  which  fame  shall  come  to  them,  but 
the  greatest  men  always  choose  their  own  fame.  It  was  through 
no  mere  accident  that  Byron  built  up  his  own  romance.  It  was 


250    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

the  particular  quality  of  his  mind  acting  upon  the  helpless  help- 
fulness of  event ;  his  genius,  turning  life  into  art  after  his  own 
fashion.  Fame  meant  so  much  to  Byron  because  fame  is  a 
personal,  active  thing,  concerned  with  one's  self  while  one  lives, 
bringing  one  into  the  sight  of  other  people  so  vividly.  He  could 
never  have  gone  on  writing  as  Shelley  went  on  writing,  ob- 
scurely, loved  by  a  few,  not  even  publicly  enough  hated.  To 
Shelley,  with  his  secluded  interior  life,  fame  meant  very  little, 
except  for  an  almost  wholly  disinterested  enthusiasm  for  ideas, 
which  he  would  gladly  have  served  with  more  immediate 
effect,  as  a  more  famous  poet.  But  Byron  exacted  fame  from 
the  world  as  he  exacted  deference  to  his  rank  from  strangers. 
His  conception  of  himself  would  not  have  been  complete  with- 
out it.  If  one  bases  success,  ever  so  little,  upon  action,  that  is, 
upon  something  external,  a  private  or  a  deferred  triumph 
must  mean  very  little.  Napoleon,  a  prisoner  at  Elba  without 
the  interval  between  Elba  and  St.  Helena:  would  that  have 
been  the  same  Napoleon? 

And  so  it  was  no  vulgarity  of  mind,  as  some  have  fancied, 
nor  even  a  necessarily  very  morbid  condition,  that  made 
Byron  so  eager  for  applause,  so  conscious  of  notoriety.  All  that, 
so  pleasing  and  so  unessential  to  the  student  or  the  studious 
artist,  was  to  Byron  an  actual  part  of  his  art.  It  was  the  can- 
vas itself,  upon  which  he  had  to  weave  his  coloured  patterns. 
It  was  necessary  to  him ;  for,  with  Byron's  amplitude  of  self- 
dramatisation,  there  was  but  that  one  traditional  step  from 
the  sublime  to  the  ridiculous.  An  obscure  person  on  his  travels, 
taking  the  world  into  his  confidence  with  so  lofty  a  naivete^ 
might  have  written  the  most  beautiful  poetry;  but,  without 
an  audience,  how  ludicrous  would  have  been  the  spectacle! 
'What  is  a  man  beside  a  mount?'  writes  Browning,  mocking 
Byron;  but  precisely  what  Byron  did  was  to  show  the  insig- 
nificance of  the  mountains  in  the  presence  of  man.  He  could 
write  of  the  Alps,  and  fill  the  imagination  of  Europe  with  the 
mere  fact  of  his  presence  there ;  adding  history  to  Waterloo, 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON     251 

because  '  his  tread  was  on  an  empire's  dust/  when  the  history 
of  that  field  had  only  just  written  itself. 

In  a  letter  to  his  mother,  written  at  the  age  of  twenty-three, 
on  his  first  visit  to  Athens,  Byron  declared  sententiously :  — 

'  I  am  so  convinced  of  the  advantages  of  looking  at  man- 
kind instead  of  reading  about  them,  and  the  bitter  effects 
of  staying  at  home  with  all  the  narrow  prejudices  of  an 
islander,  that  I  think  there  should  be  a  law  among  us,  to 
set  our  young  men  abroad  for  a  term,  among  the  few  allies 
our  wars  have  left  us.' 

Eight  years  later  he  wrote  to  Murray :  '  I  am  sure  my  bones 
would  not  rest  in  an  English  grave  or  my  clay  mix  with  the 
earth  of  that  country.'  Byron  was  so  English,  English  even  in 
that,  in  its  lofty  petulance ;  and  he  had  the  characteristically 
English  love  of  travel,  the  quality  of  Burton,  of  Borrow,  of 
his  own  grandfather,  the  sea-wanderer,  but  which  it  remained 
for  Byron  to  turn  into  a  really  thrilling  poetic  quality.  He 
travelled  because  the  adventure  pleased  him,  because,  as  he 
said,  it  'awakened  the  gipsy  in  him,' and  he  was  drawn  by  the 
mere  adventurous  search  after  new  sensations  to  the  East, 
to  Greece,  to  Italy,  to  the  countries  which  other  people  were 
writing  about  without  seeing  them,  and  which  he  visited, 
certainly  with  no  conscious  intention  of  writing  about  them. 
Poetry  came  to  him  by  a  happy  and  inevitable  accident ;  it  was 
his  way  of  recording  the  sensations.  In  the  preface  to '  Childe 
Harold '  he  speaks  of  '  the  beauties  of  nature  and  the  stimulus 
of  travel  (except  ambition,  the  most  powerful  of  all  excite- 
ments)' ;  and  it  was  a  mere  statement  of  a  fact  when  he  wrote : 

'  Where  rose  the  mountains,  there  to  him  were  friends ;    p^'  » 
Where  rolled  the  ocean,  thereon  was  his  home; 
Where  the  blue  sky,  and  glowing  clime  extends, 
He  had  the  passion  and  the  power  to  roam ; 
The  desert,  forest,  cavern,  breaker's  foam, 
Were  unto  him  companionship ;  they  spake 
A  mutual  language.' 


252    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'  A  world  to  roam  through '  is  the  first  of  his  two  wishes  in 
his  'Epistle  to  Augusta ' ;  and  that  simple  love  of  wandering, 
which  no  other  great  poet  has  ever  had  in  anything  like  the 
same  degree,  but  which  is  the  most  vivid  quality  of  many  of 
the  most  vivid  people  in  the  world,  discoverers,  travelling 
students,  or  gipsies,  was  at  the  root  of  all  his  nature-worship, 
as  it  has  been  called,  and  all  his  eloquent  writing  about  land- 
scapes and  places.  It  was  a  part  of  his  tendency  towards 
action,  of  his  human  rather  than  literary  quality.  Taste  in 
landscape  has  changed;  we  no  longer  admire  the  Alps,  or,  if 
we  do,  scarce  dare  admit  it;  we  have  almost  forgotten  that 
there  is  anything  in  nature  but  fine  shades,  and  the  materials 
for  a  picture,  in  which  nature  shall  be  trimmed  to  the  pattern 
of  frugal  souls.   Byron  liked  nature  in  vast  movement :  — 

'  Sky  —  mountains  —  river  —  woods  —  lake  —  lightnings !  ye ! 
With  night,  and  clouds,  and  thunder  —  and  a  soul 
To  make  these  felt  and  feeling.' 

His  storms  at  sea  and  his  storms  among  the  Alps  are  touched 
with  a  quality  of  rapture,  because  he  really  was  !  a  sharer '  in 
that  'fierce  and  far  delight ' ;  and,  here  as  elsewhere  in  his  work, 
truth  lies  at  the  root  of  rhetoric,  giving  it  life,  lifting  it  into  a 
kind  of  powerful,  naked,  and  undeniable  poetic  existence.  _ 
And  then,  beyond  this  raw  personal  quality,  the  fact  of 
feeling  it  intensely  whenever  he  had  'made  him  friends  of 
mountains/  'and  on  Parnassus  seen  the  eagles  fly/  there  was 
a  quality  of  feeling  still  more  deeply  personal,  a  psychological 
note,  the  landscape  being  a  'state  of  soul/  perhaps  not  quite  as 
Amiel  meant  it.  Together  with  an  astonishing  sense  of  the 
beauty  of  the  natural  world,  and  especially  of  its  power, 
splendour,  the  overwhelming  energy  of  water,  the  'beautify- 
ing '  and  consuming  energy  of  time,  the  unlimited  bounds  of 
space,  the  '  swimming  shadows  and  enormous  shapes '  of  night 
and  storm,  he  had  the  unvarying  consciousness  of  his  own 
presence  there,  so  insignificant  and  so  absorbing.  'Childe 
Harold '  has  been  called  a  kind  of  diorama ;  but  the  picture  is 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON     253 

seen  always  flowing  through  a  single  passionate,  sorrowful, 
and  sensitive  soul,  and  coloured  by  its  passage  there.  The 
secret  seems  to  be  suddenly  let  out,  when,  seated  by  the  tomb 
of  Cecilia  Metella  on  the  Appian  Way  and  dreaming  of  '  a  little 
bark  of  hope/  he  begins  to  wonder  whither  he  should  steer 
his  little  bark  if  he  had  it,  and  can  but  answer :  — 

'There  woos  no  home,  no  hope,  nor  life,  save  what  is  here.' 
Here,  the  present  moment,  best  enjoyed  in  some  active  form 
of  exile,  among  great  memories,  the  memories  of  empires,  of 
what  is  most  liberating  in  history,  or  with  nature  at  some 
height  of  ecstasy,  in  the  peril  of  the  sea,  of  snow,  of  the  hills : 
that  is  left  to  him,  and  may  be  enjoyed  with  what  forgetting 
exultation  and  melancholy  pleasure  he  can  bring  to  it. 

Byron  has  power  without  wisdom,  power  which  is  sanity, 
and  human  at  heart,  but  without  that  vision  which  is  wisdom. 
His  passion  is  without  joy,  the  resurrection,  or  that  sorrow 
deeper  than  any  known  unhappiness,  which  is  the  death  by 
which  we  attain  life.  He  has  never  known  what  it  is  to  be  at 
peace,  with  himself  or  with  outward  things.  There  is  a  certain 
haste  in  his  temper,  which  does  not  allow  him  to  wait  patiently 
upon  any  of  the  spiritual  guests  who  only  come  unbidden,  and 
to  those  who  await  them.  His  mind  is  always  full  of  busy 
little  activities,  with  which  a  more  disinterested  thinker  would 
not  be  concerned.  Himself  the  centre,  he  sees  the  world  re- 
volving about  him,  seemingly  as  conscious  of  him  as  he  of 
it.  It  is  not  only  that  he  never  forgets  himself,  but  he  never 
forgets  that  he  is  a  lord,  and  that  one  of  his  feet  is  not  perfect. 

In  his  letters,  with  their  brilliant  common  sense,  their  wit, 
their  clear  and  defiant  intellect,  their  intolerant  sincerity,  as 
in  his  poems,  it  is  not  what  we  call  the  poet  who  speaks,  it  is 
what  we  call  the  natural  man.  Byron  is  the  supreme  incar- 
nation of  the  natural  man.  When  he  gets  nearest  to  philo- 
sophical thought  it  is  in  an  amazingly  frank  statement  of  the 
puzzle  of  the  natural  man  before  the  facts  of  the  universe,  a 
puzzle  which,  like  him,  he  laughs  off:  — 


254     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'And  that  which  after  all  my  spirit  vexes, 
Is,  that  I  find  no  spot  where  man  can  rest  eye  on, 

Without  confusion  of  the  sorts  and  sexes, 
Of  beings,  stars,  and  this  unriddled  wonder, 
The  world,  which  at  the  worst 's  a  glorious  blunder.' 

His  feeling  for  the  arts  is  on  the  same  level,  with  the  same 
earnest,  uneducated  quickness  of  feeling,  when  once  the  feeling 
is  stirred.  '  At  Florence/  he  writes  in  a  letter, '  I  remained  but 
a  day,  having  to  hurry  for  Rome.  However,  I  went  to  the  two 
galleries,  from  which  one  returns  drunk  with  beauty ;  but  there 
are  sculpture  and  painting  which,  for  the  first  time,  gave  me  an 
idea  of  what  people  mean  by  their  cant  about  those  two  most 
artificial  of  the  arts.'  '  You  must  recollect,  however,'  he  says 
in  another  letter  (after  some  beautiful  and  passionate  sen- 
tences on  a  portrait  of  'some  learned  lady  centuries  old'), 
'  that  I  know  nothing  of  painting,  and  that  I  detest  it,  unless  it 
reminds  me  of  something  I  have  seen,  or  think  it  possible  to 
see.'  The  portrait  of  the  learned  lady  is  '  the  kind  of  face  to 
go  mad  for,  because  it  cannot  walk  out  of  its  frame ' ;  its 
'  beauty  and  sweetness  and  wisdom '  are  its  human  attributes, 
not  the  attributes  of  its  art ;  here,  as  always,  it  is  for  life  that 
Byron  cries  out,  the  naked  contact  of  humanity,  as  the  only 
warmth  in  the  world. 

And  so,  not  so  very  long  before  it  was  too  late,  he  discovered 
how  he  was  meant  to  write  in  verse,  '  with  common  words  in 
their  common  places,'  as  Jeffrey  defined  it ;  and  then,  for  the 
first  time,  his  verse  became  as  good  as  his  prose,  and  a  stanza 
of  his  rhyme  could  be  matched  as  mere  writing  against  a 
paragraph  from  one  of  his  letters.  Neither  Keats  nor  Shelley, 
not  even  Wordsworth,  much  less  Coleridge,  was  content  with 
our  language  as  we  have  it;  all,  on  theory  or  against  theory, 
used  inversions,  and  wrote  otherwise  than  they  would  speak  ; 
it  was  Byron,  with  his  boisterous  contempt  for  rules,  his  head- 
long way  of  getting  to  the  journey's  end,  who  discovered  that 
poetry,  which  is  speech  as  well  as  song,  and  speech  not  least 
when  it  is  most  song,  can  be  written  not  only  with  the  words 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON     255 

we  use  in  talking,  but  in  exactly  the  same  order  and  construc- 
tion. And,  besides  realising  this  truth  for  other  people  who 
were  to  come  later  and  make  a  different  use  of  the  discovery, 
he  realised  for  himself  that  he  could  make  poetry  entirely  con- 
versational, thus  getting  closer  to  that  world  which  was  'too 
much  with  him.'  Who  in  English  poetry  before  Byron  has 
ever  talked  in  verse?  Taking  a  hint  from  Frere,  who  had  no- 
thing to  say,  and  did  but  show  how  things  might  be  said, 
Byron  gave  up  oratory  and  came  nearer  than  he  had  yet  come 
to  poetry  by  merely  talking.  'I  have  broken  down  the  poetry 
as  nearly  as  I  could  to  common  language,'  he  says  in  a  letter, 
referring  to  ' Sardanapalus ' ;  but  in  such  attempts  to  be  'as 
simple  and  severe  as  Alfieri/  the  lamentable  attempts  of  the 
dramas,  there  is  only  too  thorough  a  'breaking  down'  of 
poetry  to  a  level  which  is  not  even  that  of  good  prose.  In 
'Beppo/  in  the  'Vision  of  Judgment/  and  in  'Don  Juan,' 
words,  style,  language,  subject,  are  at  one;  the  colloquial 
manner  is  used  for  what  is  really  talk,  extraordinarily  brilliant 
talk,  and  at  the  same  time,  as  Goethe  saw,  a '  classically  elegant 
comic  style ' ;  the  natural  man  is  at  last  wholly  himself,  all  of 
himself,  himself  not  even  exaggerated  for  effect. 

Never,  in  English  verse,  has  a  man  been  seen  who  was  so 
much  a  man  and  so  much  an  Englishman.  It  is  not  man  in 
the  elemental  sense,  so  much  as  the  man  of  the  world,  whom  we 
find  reflected,  in  a  magnificent  way,  in  this  poet  for  whom 
(like  the  novelists,  and  unlike  all  other  poets)  society  exists 
as  well  as  human  nature.  No  man  of  the  world  would  feel 
ashamed  of  himself  for  writing  poetry  like  '  Don  Juan,'  if  he 
could  write  it;  and  not  only  because  the  poet  himself  seems 
conscious  of  all  there  is  ridiculous  in  the  mere  fact  of  writing 
in  rhyme,  when  everything  can  be  so  well  said  in  prose.  It  is 
the  poetry  of  middle  age  (premature  with  Byron,  'ennuye  at 
nineteen/  as  he  assures  us),  and  it  condenses  all  the  temporary 
wisdom,  old  enough  to  be  a  little  sour  and  not  old  enough  to 
have  recovered  sweetness,  of  perhaps  the  least  profitable  period 


256    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

of  life.  It  is  sad  and  cynical  with  experience,  and  is  at  the 
stage  between  storm  and  peace;  it  doubts  everything,  as 
everything  must  be  doubted  before  it  can  be  understood 
rightly  and  rightly  apprehended;  it  regrets  youth,  which  lies 
behind  it,  and  hates  the  thought  of  age,  which  lies  before  it, 
with  a  kind  of  passionate  self-pity;  it  has  knowledge  rather 
than  wisdom,  and  is  a  little  mirror  of  the  world,  turned  away 
from  the  sky,  so  that  only  the  earth  is  visible  in  it.  Shake- 
speare has  put  all  the  world's  motley  into  his  picture ;  but  is 
not  the  world,  to  Shakespeare,  that  'insubstantial  pageant' 
which  is  always  about  to  fade,  and  which  fades  into  nothing- 
ness whenever  Hamlet  gets  alone  with  his  soul,  or  Macbeth 
with  his  conscience,  or  even  Othello  with  his  honour?  Byron's 
thought,  which  embraced  Europe  as  another  man's  thought 
might  have  embraced  the  village  from  which  he  had  risen, 
was  too  conscious  of  politics,  nations,  events,  Napoleon, 
George  III,  and  other  trifles  in  eternity,  to  be  quite  free  to 
overlook  the  edge  of  the  globe,  and  bring  back  news,  or  at  least 
a  significant  silence,  from  that  ultimate  inspection.  He  taught 
poetry  to  be  vividly  interested  in  all  earthly  things,  and  for 
their  own  sake;  and  if  anyone  had  reminded  him  with  Calderon 
that '  Life 's  a  dream,  and  dreams  themselves  are  a  dream/  he 
would  have  replied  that,  at  all  events,  the  dream  is  a  real  thing, 
and  the  only  reality,  to  the  dreamer,  and  that  he  was  not  yet 
through  with  his  sleep. 

What  came  to  give  him  his  measure  of  distinction,  his  dark 
background,  whatever  he  has  of  depth,  was,  characteristically, 
a  personal  accident,  as  it  might  seem,  a  fiery  melancholy,  for 
which  he  held  the  nature  of  things,  no  less  than  his  own  nature, 
responsible.  Conscience,  some  inexplicable  self-torture,  a 
gloomy  belief  that  the  sun 

1  shall  not  beam  on  one 
To  whom  the  gifts  of  life  and  warmth  have  been 
Of  a  more  fatal  nature ' ; 

these,  with  almost  an  admitted  pride  in  their  potency,  and  a 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON  257 

strenuous  and  reiterated  pride  in  dominating  them,  were  given 

to  Byron  lest  the  world  should  have  satisfied  him,  which  is 

failure  in  life.   One  of  the  spirits  in  'Manfred'  says  to  the 

other :  — 

'  This  is  to  be  a  mortal, 
And  seek  the  things  beyond  mortality ' ; 

and  the  other  answers :  — 

1  Yet,  see,  he  mastereth  himself,  and  makes 
His  torture  tributary  to  his  will. 
Had  he  been  one  of  us,  he  would  have  made 
An  awful  spirit.' 

It  was  good  for  Byron  that  he  was  unhappy,  that  memories 
and  apprehensions  came  to  rescue  him  harshly  out  of  the 
present,  in  which  he  might  so  easily  have  taken  too  unthinking 
a  pleasure.  The  triviality  which  was  one  side  of  his  manliness, 
the  scorn  of  vague  speculation,  which  was  in  danger  of  drifting 
into  an  indifference  towards  ideas,  the  excess  of  his  mental 
tendency  towards  action,  were  all  lying  in  wait  for  him,  and,  in 
the  absence  of  some  overshadowing  and  overpowering  idea, 
would  have  found  him  at  their  mercy.  Byron  was  not  a 
thinker,  but  he  was  afraid  of  hell,  and  his  courage  throughout 
life  was  the  genuine  courage  of  one  to  whom  death  was  really 
terrifying.  'The  worst  of  it  is  that  I  do  believe/  he  said;  and 
his  belief  was  that  he  was  predestined  to  fall  endlessly  into 
the  power  of  evil.  It  is  his  own  portrait,  as  he  conceived  it, 
that  he  draws  in  '  Manfred ' :  — 

'  This  should  have  been  a  noble  creature :  he 
Hath  all  the  energy  which  should  have  made 
A  goodly  frame  of  glorious  elements, 
Had  they  been  wisely  mingled ;  as  it  is, 
It  is  an  awful  chaos  —  light  and  darkness  — 
And  mind  and  dust  —  and  passions  and  pure  thoughts, 
Mixed,  and  contending  without  end  or  order, 
All  dormant  and  destructive.' 

What  other,  more  human  memories,  regrets,  unavailing  re- 
pentances mingled  with  this  fatalistic  sense  of  condemnation, 


258    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

we  cannot  tell;  but  certainly  Byron's  half-proud  and  half- 
desperate  sense  of  sin  was  no  pose,  but  almost  the  deepest  part 
of  his  inner  life. 

1  Our  life  is  a  false  nature  —  't  is  not  in 
The  harmony  of  things,  — ■  this  hard  decree, 
This  uneradicable  taint  of  sin, 
This  boundless  Upas,  this  all-blasting  tree, 
Whose  root  is  Earth' : 

such  an  outcry,  in  'Childe  Harold,'  means  at  least  all  that  it 
says.  If  Byron's  fixed  unhappiness  were  but  the  weariness  of 
one  to  whom  pleasure  had  been  too  kind,  or  a  mere  scowl  for 
effect,  like  the  '  unhappy '  expression  which  he  assumed  when 
sitting  for  his  bust  to  Thorwaldsen,  then  his  personality,  the 
one  thing  which  has  profoundly  interested  the  world  in  him, 
was  but  a  playing  at  hide-and-seek  with  emotion.  Not  to  have 
been  sincere  (sincere  at  root,  beneath  all  the  rhetoric)  would 
have  been,  for  Byron,  to  have  lost  all  hold  on  our  sympathy, 
all  command  of  our  admiration. 

Byron's  ennui,  what  he  meant  when  he  called  himself  'the 
earth's  tired  denizen/  was  made  up  of  many  elements,  but  it 
was  partly  of  that  most  incurable  kind  which  comes  from 
emptiness  rather  than  over-fulness ;  the  ennui  of  one  to  whom 
thought  was  not  satisfying,  without  sustenance  in  itself,  but 
itself  a  cause  of  restlessness,  like  a  heady  wine  drunk  in 
solitude.  'The  blight  of  life,  the  demon  thought,'  he  called  it, 
so  early  as  the  first  canto  of  '  Childe  Harold ' ;  and  a  motto  to 
the  third  canto,  seven  years  later,  is  a  quotation  from  a  letter 
of  Frederick  the  Great  to  D'Alembert,  endeavouring  to  console 
him  for  the  loss  of  Mile,  de  Lespinasse,  and  advising  '  quelque 
probleme  bien  difficile  a  r6soudre,'  'afin  que  cette  application 
vous  forcat  a  penser  a  autre  chose.  II  n'y  a  en  verity  de  remede 
que  celui-la  et  le  temps.'  To  think  of  something  else!  the 
mockery  of  a  remedy,  and  yet  the  only  one.  Byron  clamoured 
for  all  the  good  things  of  life,  as  a  child  clamours,  passionately, 
amidst  storms  of  tears,  when  one  of  them  is  denied  him. 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON     259 

Seeming  to  others  to  have  got  more  than  his  share,  he  was  dis- 
contented if  he  did  not  get  all  he  wanted ;  and  no  one,  in  this 
world,  gets  quite  all  he  wants  when  he  wants  so  many  things 
as  Byron.  It  has  seemed  strange  to  some  that  Byron  should 
have  been  so  sensitive  to  dispraise,  so  restive  under  any  check. 
But  it  was  part  of  his  nature ;  it  was  but  another  manifesta- 
tion of  that  'straining  after  the  unlimited'  which  Goethe  saw 
to  be  one  of  his  main  characteristics. 

And  then  Byron  suffered,  we  can  hardly  doubt,  from  that 
too  vivid  sense  of  humanity  which  is  like  a  disease,  that  ob- 
session to  which  every  face  is  a  challenge  and  every  look  an 
acceptance  or  a  rebuff.  How  is  content  in  life  possible  to  those 
condemned  to  go  about  like  magnets,  attracting  or  repelling 
every  animate  thing,  and  tormented  by  the  restlessness  which 
their  mere  presence  communicates  to  the  air  about  them? 
This  magnetic  nature  is  not  given  to  man  for  his  happiness. 
Condemning  him  to  'plunge  into  the  crowd,'  it  leaves  him  at 
the  crowd's  mercy,  as  he  sensitively  feels  the  shock  of  every 
disturbance  which  he  causes  there.  Driving  him  into  solitude 
for  an  escape,  it  will  not  let  him  even  there  escape  the  thought 
of  what  in  himself  is  so  much  an  epitome  of  humanity,  for 
'quiet  to  quick  bosoms  is  a  hell.'  Nature  becomes  painfully 
human  to  him,  and  seems  a  sort  of  external  memory,  recorded 
in  symbols.  A  note  in  Byron's  Swiss  Journal,  afterwards 
brought  almost  word  for  word  into  '  Manfred,'  shows  us  this 
effect  of  nature:  'Passed  whole  woods  of  withered  pines,  all 
withered ;  trunks  stripped  and  barkless,  branches  lifeless,  done 
by  a  single  winter;  their  appearance  reminded  me  of  me  and 
my  family.'  We  find  him  declaring,  with  unaccustomed  so- 
lemnity, that  'neither  the  music  of  the  shepherd,  the  crashing 
of  the  avalanche,  nor  the  torrent,  the  mountain,  the  glacier, 
the  forest,  nor  the  cloud,  have  for  one  moment  lightened  the 
weight  upon  my  heart  nor  enabled  me  to  lose  my  own  wretched 
identity  in  the  majesty,  and  the  power,  and  the  glory,  around, 
above,  and  beneath  me.'  Byron's  thought  about  the  universe, 


260     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

even  when  it  came  nearest  to  abstract  thinking,  was  always 
conditioned,  and  for  the  most  part  quite  frankly,  by  his  per- 
sonal circumstances.  He  wrote  'Manfred'  because  of  'the 
Steinbach,  and  the  Jungfrau,  and  something  else,  much  more 
than  Faustus.'  He  filled  'Cain'  with  exactly  the  same  argu- 
ments that  he  used  in  his  conversations  with  Dr.  Kennedy. 
1  Don  Juan '  speaks  in  almost  the  same  words  as  his  familiar 
letters. 

The  melancholy  of  Childe  Harold,  of  Byron  himself,  which 
has  been  so  often  associated  with  the  deeper  and  more  thought- 
ful melancholy  of  Rene,  of  Obermann,  is  that  discontent  with 
the  world  which  comes  from  too  great  love  of  the  world,  and 
not  properly  an  intellectual  dissatisfaction  at  all.  It  gave  birth 
to  a  whole  literature  of  pessimism,  in  which  what  had  been  in 
Byron  an  acute  personal  ache  became  an  imagined  travailing 
of  the  whole  world  in  a  vast  disgust  at  its  own  existence. 
Where  Byron,  as  he  admitted,  'deviated  into  the  gloomy 
vanity  of  "  drawing  from  self/' '  less  energetic  and  more  con- 
templative writers  spoke  for  humanity,  as  they  conceived  it, 
and  found  everything  grey  with  their  own  old  age  of  soul, 
which  had  never  been  young.  It  was  only  Byron  who  could 
say,  after  a  visit  to  the  opera,  on  which  he  comments  with  the 
most  cheerful  malice:  'How  I  do  delight  in  observing  life  as 
it  really  is ! '  And  it  is  just  here  that  he  distinguishes  himself 
from  his  followers,  in  his  right  to  say,  as  he  said :  — 
'  But  I  have  lived,  and  have  not  lived  in  vain.' 

Byron  is  a  moralist,  and  a  moralist  of  great  simplicity. 
He  had 

'That  just  habitual  scorn,  which  could  contemn 
Men  and  their  thoughts/ 

at  the  same  time  that  he  was  conscious  of  his  own  most  human 
weaknesses ;  and,  in  a  fragment  not  included  in  '  Don  Juan/  he 
cries  very  sincerely :  — 

'  I  would  to  heaven  that  I  were  so  much  clay, 
As  I  am  blood,  bone,  marrow,  passion,  feeling/ 


GEORGE  GORDON,  LORD  BYRON     261 

He  speaks  his  impressive  epitaph  over  human  greatness  and 
the  wrecks  of  great  cities,  because  it  is  the  natural  impulse  of 
the  natural  man ;  and  his  moralisings,  always  so  personal,  are 
generally  what  would  seem  to  most  people  the  obvious  thought 
under  the  circumstances.  When  he  is  most  moved,  by  some 
indignation,  which  in  verse  and  prose  always  made  him  write 
best,  he  seems  to  resign  himself  to  what  was  noblest  in  him : 
the  passion  for  liberty  (a  passion  strong  enough  to  die  for,  as  he 
proved),  the  passion  against  injustice,  the  passion  of  the  will  to 
live  and  the  will  to  know,  fretting  against  the  limits  of  death 
and  ignorance.  It  was  then  that  'thoughts  which  should  call 
down  thunder '  came  to  him,  calling  down  thunder  indeed,  on 
the  wrongs  and  hypocrisies  of  his  time  and  country,  as  a 
moralist  more  intellectually  disinterested,  further  aloof  from 
the  consequences  of  his  words,  could  not  have  done. 

Byron  had  no  philosophy ;  he  saw  no  remedy  or  alternative 
for  any  evil,  least  of  all  in  his  own  mind,  itself  more  tossed 
than  the  world  without  him.  He  had  flaming  doubts,  stormy 
denials;  he  had  the  idealism  of  revolt,  and  fought  instead  of 
dreaming.  His  idolatry  of  good  is  shown  by  his  remorseful 
consciousness  of  evil,  morbid,  as  it  has  seemed  to  those  who 
have  not  realised  that  every  form  of  spiritual  energy  has  some- 
thing of  the  divine  in  it,  and  is  on  its  way  to  become  divine. 
'Cain'  is  a  long,  restless,  proud,  and  helpless  questioning  of 
the  powers  of  good  and  evil,  by  one  who  can  say :  — 

'  I  will  have  nought  to  do  with  happiness 
Which  humbles  me  and  mine/ 

with  a  pride  equal  to  Lucifer's;  and  can  say  also,  in  all  the 
humility  of  admitted  defeat :  — 

'Were  I  quiet  earth, 
That  were  no  evil.' 

'  Obstinate  questionings/  resolving  themselves  into  nothing 
except  that  pride  and  that  humility  of  despair,  form  the  whole 
drama  in  which  Byron  has  come  nearest  to  abstract  thinking, 


262     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

in  his  'gay  metaphysical  style,'  as  he  called  it.  'Think  and 
endure'  is  Lucifer's  last  counsel  to  Cain.  'Why  art  thou 
wretched?'  he  has  already  asked  him;  and  been  answered: 
'Why  do  I  exist?'  Cain's  arraignment  of  God,  which  has 
nothing  startling  to  us,  who  have  read  Nietzsche,  raised  all 
England  in  a  kind  of  panic ;  religion  itself  seemed  to  be  totter- 
ing. But  Byron  went  no  further  in  that  direction ;  his  greater 
strength  lay  elsewhere.  Dropping  heroics,  he  concludes, 
at  the  time  that  he  is  writing  'Don  Juan,'  that  man  'has 
always  been  and  always  will  be  an  unlucky  rascal,'  with  a 
tragic  acquiescence  in  that  summary  settlement  of  the  enigma, 
laughingly.  Humour  was  given  us  that  we  might  disguise 
from  ourselves  the  consciousness  of  our  common  misery. 
Humour  turned  by  thought  into  irony,  which  is  humour 
thinking  about  itself,  is  the  world's  substitute  for  philosophy, 
perhaps  the  only  weapon  that  can  be  turned  against  it  with 
success.  Byron  used  the  world's  irony  to  condemn  the  world. 
He  had  conquered  its  attention  by  the  vast  clamour  of  his 
revolt ;  he  had  lulled  it  asleep  by  an  apparent  acceptance  of  its 
terms;  now,  like  a  treacherous  friend,  treacherous  with  the 
sublime  treachery  of  the  intellect,  he  drove  the  nail  into  its 
sleeping  forehead. 

And  so  we  see  Byron  ending,  after  all  the  '  daring,  dash,  and 
grandiosity'  (to  use  Goethe's  words,  as  they  are  rendered  by 
Matthew  Arnold)  of  his  earlier  work,  a  tired  and  melancholy 
jester,  still  fierce  at  heart.  Byron  gives  us,  in  an  overwhelming 
way,  the  desire  of  life,  the  enjoyment  of  life,  and  the  sense  of 
life's  deceit,  as  it  vanishes  from  between  our  hands,  and  slips 
from  under  our  feet,  and  is  a  voice  and  no  more.  In  his  own 
way  he  preaches  'vanity  of  vanities,'  and  not  less  cogently 
because  he  has  been  drunk  with  life,  like  Solomon  himself,  and 
has  not  yet  lost  the  sense  of  what  is  intoxicating  in  it.  He 
has  given  up  the  declamation  of  despair,  as  after  all  an  effect, 
however  sincere,  of  rhetoric;  his  jesting  is  more  sorrowful 
than  his  outcries,  for  it  shows  him  to  have  surrendered. 


RICHARD  HARRIS  BARHAM  263 

'  We  live  and  die, 
But  which  is  best,  you  know  no  more  than  I.' 

All  his  wisdom  (experience,  love  of  nature,  passion,  tenderness, 
pride,  the  thirst  for  knowledge)  comes  to  that  in  the  end,  not 
even  a  negation. 


RICHARD  HARRIS  BARHAM  (1788-1845)  l 

The  Rev.  Richard  Harris  Barham  was  a  great  creator  of  non- 
sense, and  he  had  a  prodigious  faculty  for  versifying.  He 
wrote  entirely  for  his  own  amusement;  or,  as  a  friend  said  of 
him:  'The  same  relaxation  which  some  men  seek  in  music, 
pictures,  cards,  or  newspapers,  he  sought  in  verse.'  Most  of 
his  rhymes  were  written  down  at  odd  moments,  often  after 
midnight,  and  with  a  facility,  his  son  tells  us,  'which  not  only 
surprised  himself,  but  which  he  actually  viewed  with  distrust ; 
and  he  would  not  unfrequently  lay  down  his  pen,  from  an 
apprehension  that  what  was  so  fluent  must  of  necessity  be 
feeble.'  In  all  this  helter-skelter  of  '  mirth  and  marvels,'  begun 
for  Bentley's  'Miscellany'  in  1837,  when  he  was  nearly  fifty 
years  of  age,  there  is  nothing  feeble  in  all  the  fluency.  No 
verse  that  has  been  written  in  English  goes  so  fast  or  turns  so 
many  somersaults  on  the  way.  He  said  once,  of  a  poem  which 
he  did  not  care  for, '  that  the  only  chance  to  make  it  effective 
was  to  strike  out  something  newish  in  the  stanza,  to  make 
people  stare.'  If  that  was  ever  his  aim,  he  attained  it,  and  not 
in  his  rhymes  only.  The  rhymes  are  marvellous,  and  if  they 
are  not  the  strictest,  have  the  most  spontaneous  sound  of  any 
in  English.  The  clatter  of  '  atmosphere '  and  '  that  must  fear,' 
the  gabble  of  — 

'  And  so  like  a  dragon  he 

Looked  in  liis  agony,' 

with  even  the  more  elaborately  manufactured  — 

1  (1)  Ingoldsby  Legends,  first  series,  1840;  second  series,  1843;  third 
series,  1847.   (2)  Lyrics,  1881. 


264     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

'  twisting  dom- 
estic and  foreign  necks  all  over  Christendom,' 

have  so  easy  a  jingle  as  they  go  galloping  over  the  page,  that 
we  are  hardly  conscious  how  artificial  they  really  are.  With 
the  rhymes  go  rhythms,  so  bold,  swift,  and  irreverent,  and 
with  pauses  so  alarming  that  one  is  never  able,  if  one  has  read 
them  as  a  child,  to  get  out  of  one's  head  the  solemn  thrill  of  — 

'  Open  lock 
To  the  Deadman's  knock!' 

or  the  ghastly  gaiety  in  the  sound  of  — 

'  Hairy-faced  Dick  at  once  lets  fly, 
And  knocks  off  the  head  of  young  Hamilton  Tighe.' 

Under  all  the  extravagance,  like  a  light  through  a  lantern, 
there  is  meaning,  let  wildly  loose,  but  with  something  macabre, 
grim,  ghastly,  above  all  haunted,  in  it.  Barham's  material 
came  to  him  partly  out  of  old  books,  which  he  read  to  catch 
from  them  a  harsh  Protestant  laughter  against  Catholics; 
but  for  the  better  part  from  legends  which  he  found  in  his  own 
neighbourhood.  A  scholar  revels  throughout  these  unclerical 
rhymes,  .drawing  wicked  and  harmless  imps  out  of  book  and 
bottle  as  he  pores,  past  midnight,  over  his  black-letter  folios 
and  his  port.  And  so  we  find,  in  these  poems  made  up  of  fear, 
fun,  and  suspense,  a  kind  of  burlesque  which  is  not  quite  like 
any  other,  so  jolly  is  it  as  it  fumbles  with  death,  murder,  tor- 
tures, and  terrors  of  the  mind.  Here  is  burlesque  of  that  ex- 
cessive kind  which  foreigners  see  in  the  tragic  laughing  white 
clown  in  the  arena,  with  his  touch  of  mortal  colour  in  the 
cheeks.  And  it  is  full  of  queer  ornament,  as  in  this  interior  of 
Bluebeard's  castle,  furnished  as  if  by  Beardsley:  — 

'It  boasts  not  stool,  table,  or  chair, 

Bloudie  Jacke! 
But  one  Cabinet,  costly  and  grand, 
Which  has  little  gold  figures 
Of  little  gold  niggers, 
With  fishing-rods  stuck  in  each  hand ; 

It's  japanned, 
And  it's  placed  on  a  splendid  buhl  stand.' 


REV.   HENRY  HART  MILMAN  265 

Was  there  ever  a  gayer  and  ghastlier  farce  than  in  this  very- 
poem,  '  Bloudie  Jacke  of  Shrewsberrie/  which  goes  to  the  jin- 
gling of  bells,  in  a  metre  invented  as  if  to  fit  into  an  interval 
between  Poe  and  Browning?  To  be  so  successfully  vulgar 
in  '  Misadventures  at  Margate '  is  to  challenge  the  lesser  feats 
of  Hood,  and  the  prose  of  a  narrative  like  'The  Leech  of  Folke- 
stone '  (part  of  what  the  writer  called  'prose  material  to  serve 
as  sewing-silk  and  buckram')  is,  for  all  its  oddity,  almost  as 
chilling  to  the  blood  as  Sheridan  Lefanu's  in  his  book  of  vam- 
pires, 'In  a  Glass  Darkly.'  But  where  Barham  is  most  him- 
self, and  wonderful  in  his  way,  is  in  the  cascading  of  cadences 
rhymed  after  this  fashion :  — 

'There's  Setebos,  storming  because  Mepbistopheles 

Gave  him  the  he, 
Said  he'd  "  blacken  his  eye," 
And  dashed  in  his  face  a  whole  cup  of  hot  coffee-lees.' 

Not  Butler  nor  Byron  nor  Browning,  the  three  best  makers  of 
comic  rhyme,  has  ever  shown  so  supreme  an  inventiveness  in 
the  art. 


REV.  HENRY  HART  MILMAN   (1791-1868)  * 

Of  Milman's  plays  three  are  Biblical  and  lifeless;  one,  'Fazio/ 
is  moving,  for  all  its  childishness  of  construction,  its  scenes 
of  a  few  lines,  the  naivete  with  which  the  speeches  follow  one 
another  with  too  carefully  irregular  a  logic  of  the  passions. 
There  is  a  quaint,  unnatural  neatness  in  these  small  scenes, 
with  their  brief  statement,  not  action,  written  after  the 
Elizabethan  manner  by  one  who  has  often  a  firm  vigour  in 

1  (1)  The  Apollo  Belvidere,  1810.  (2)  Fazio,  1815.  (3)  Samor,  1818. 
(4)  The  Fall  of  Jerusalem,  1820.  (5)  The  Belvidere  Apollo,  1821.  (6)  The 
Martyr  of  Antioch,  1822.  (7)  Belshazzar,  1822.  (8)  Anne  Boleyn,  1826. 
(9)  Mahabharata  (translated  from  the  Sanscrit),  1835.  (10)  Poetical  Works, 
3  vols.,  1839.  (11)  Agamemnon  (translation),  1865.  (12)  Bacchae  (trans- 
lation), 1865. 


266    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

speech,  a  diction  sometimes  really  poetical,  but  no  mastery 
of  drama,  either  as  life  or  as  form.  In  lines  like  these,  — 

'  If  that  ye  cast  us  to  the  winds,  the  winds 
Will  give  us  their  unruly  restless  nature; 
We  whirl  and  whirl;  and  where  we  settle,  Fazio, 
But  he  that  ruleth  the  mad  winds  can  know,' 

there  is  a  suggestion  never  fully  realised,  of  sensitive  dramatic 
speech. 

The  three  Biblical  plays,  'The  Fall  of  Jerusalem/  'The 
Martyr  of  Antioch/  and  '  Belshazzar/  are  almost  equally 
pompous,  lifeless,  and  artificial.  Frigid  blank  verse,  sometimes 
strained  and  gaudy,  sometimes  dragging  with  it  heavy  loads  of 
false  sentiment,  alternates  with  rhymed  verse,  brought  in  for 
no  sufficient  reason,  and  producing  no  effect  even  of  relief. 
The  author  assures  us,  but  needlessly,  that  his  plays  were  not 
intended  for  the  stage.  They  were  read  and  admired  in  their 
day  for  what  was  supposed  to  be  a  kind  of  '  classical '  merit. 
The  'Quarterly  Review/  reviewing  'The  Fall  of  Jerusalem! 
in  1820,  and  rebuking  Shelley  for  having,  in  'The  Cenci/  'ex- 
pected to  afford  mankind  delight  by  a  facsimile  of  unmingled 
wickedness  and  horror/  goes  on  to  say  that  the  clerical  author 
had  produced  a  poem,  'to  which,  without  extravagant  en- 
comium, it  is  not  unsafe  to  promise  whatever  immortality 
the  English  language  can  bestow.'  To-day  all  three  lie  bound 
like  mummies,  warning  us  against  the  death  of  reputa- 
tions. 


REV.  CHARLES  WOLFE  (1791-1823)  » 

Wolfe  is  remembered  by  one  poem,  'The  Burial  of  Sir  John 
Moore/  in  which  he  competes  with  Campbell,  and  goes  beyond 

1  Remains  of  the  late  Rev.  Charles  Wolfe,  A.  B.,  Curate  of  Bomough- 
more,  Diocese  of  Armagh;  with  a  brief  Memoir  of  his  Life,  by  the  Rev. 
John  A.  Russell,  M.  A.,  Archdeacon  of  Clogher,  1825. 


REV.  CHARLES  WOLFE  267 

at  all  events  the  poem  which  he  chiefly  admired,  'Hohen- 
linden.'  He  did  nothing  really  good  besides  this  poem,  but  it 
was  the  outcome  of  a  nature  in  which  poetry  germinated. 
Everything  we  are  told  about  his  short  and  attractive  life 
shows  us  a  sensitive  temperament,  very  much  under  the  influ- 
ence of  music,  and  a  mind  of  intense  but  strictly  limited  con- 
centration, capable  of  momentary  absorption,  but  no  more. 
He  was,  within  his  limits,  a  careful  artist ;  and  even  when  he 
seems  to  imitate  Moore  or  other  bad  models  he  is  for  the  most 
part  working  on  a  genuine,  though  faint  and  transitory,  im- 
pulse, like  those  lines,  whose  pathos  is  taken  straight  from  the 
natural  pathos  of  an  Irish  air,  which  'he  had  sung  over  and 
over  till  he  burst  into  tears,  in  which  mood  he  composed  the 
words.'  Thus  the  one  poem  in  which  he  is  perfectly  successful 
is  no  happy  and  inexplicable  accident,  but  the  culmination  of 
all  his  qualities  as  an  artist.  He  distrusted  his  own  impulse, 
and  only  once  met  with  a  subject  which  so  completely  pos- 
sessed him  that  it  gave  substance  to  his  material  and  gravity 
to  his  style.  There  is  in  this  poem,  which  is  one  of  the  most 
simple  and  direct  poems  of  the  kind  in  any  language,  a  touch 
which  links  it  with  the  characteristic  Irish  lyric,  the  line:  — 

'  And  we  far  away  on  the  billow.' 
The  epithets,  'distant  and  random/  'sullenly/  are  precise 
and  unusual ;  and  from  beginning  to  end  there  is  what  poems 
of  the  sort  usually  lack,  atmosphere.  It  has  a  masculine  ten- 
derness which  no  doubt  was  largely  what  made  Byron  divine 
in  it,  as  it  floated  anonymously  about  the  country,  a  thing 
'  little  inferior  to  the  best  which  the  present  prolific  age  has 
brought  forth.' 


268    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY   (1792-1822) 


'I  have  the  vanity  to  write  only  for  poetical  minds/  Shelley 
said  to  Trelawny,  'and  must  be  satisfied  with  few  readers.' 
'I  am,  and  I  desire  to  be,  nothing/  he  wrote  to  Leigh  Hunt, 
while  urging  him  to  'assume  a  station  in  modern  literature 
which  the  universal  voice  of  my  contemporaries  forbids  me 
either  to  stoop  or  to  aspire  to.'  Yet  he  said  also,  '  Nothing  is 
more  difficult  and  unwelcome  than  to  write  without  a  confi- 
dence of  finding  readers ' ;  and,  '  It  is  impossible  to  compose 
except  under  the  strong  excitement  of  an  assurance  of  finding 
sympathy  in  what  you  write.'  Of  the  books  which  he  published 
during  his  lifetime,  some  were  published  without  his  name, 
some  were  suppressed  at  the  very  moment  of  publication. 
Only  'The  Cenci'  went  into  a  second  edition.  Without  read- 
ers, he  was  without  due  recognition  from  the  poets  of  his  tim.e.g,  > 
Byron  was  jealous,  if  we  may  believe  Trelawny,  but  neither^; 
Keats  nor  Wordsworth  nor  Leigh  Hunt  nor  Southey  nor** 
Landor  seems  ever  to  have  considered  him  seriously  as  a  rival. 
We  must  go  to  the  enthusiastic  unimportant  Wilson,  to  find 
an  adequate  word  of  praise ;  for  to  Wilson  '  Mr.  Shelley  was  a 
poet,  almost  in  the  very  highest  sense  of  that  mysterious  word.' 

1  (1)  Original  Poetry  by  Victor  and  Cazire,  1810.  (2)  Posthumous  Frag- 
ments of  Margaret  Nicholson,  1810.  (3)  The  Devil's  Walk,  a  broadside, 
1812.  (A)QueenMab,  1813, 1821.  (5)  Alastor,  1816.  (6)  LaonandCythna, 
1818.  (7)  The  Revolt  of  Islam,  1818.  (8)  Rosalind  and  Helen,  1819. 
(9)  The  Cenci,  1819.  (10)  Prometheus  Unbound,  1820.  (11)  (Edipus 
Tyrannus;  or,  Swellfoot  the  Tyrant,  1820.  (12)  Adonais,  1820.  (13) 
Epipsychidion,  1821.  (14)  Hellas,  1822.  (15)  Poetical  Pieces,  1823.  (16) 
Posthumous  Poems,  1824.  (17)  The  Masque  of  Anarchy,  1832,  (18)  The 
Shelley  Papers,  prose  and  verse,  1833.  (19)  Poetical  Works,  edited  by  Mrs. 
Shelley,  1839.  (20)  Relics  of  Shelley,  edited  by  Dr.  Garnett,  1862.  (21) 
The  Daemon  of  the  World,  edited  by  H.  B.  Forman,  1876.  (22)  Poetical 
Works,  edited  by  H.  B.  Forman,  8  vols.,  1876-80. 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  269 

The  general  public  hated  him  without  reading  him,  and  even 
his  death  did  not  raise  him  from  oblivion.  But  Time  has  been 
on  his  side,  and  to-day  the  general  reader,  if  you  mention  the 
word  poet  to  him,  thinks  of  Shelley. 

It  is  only  by  reading  contemporary  writings  and  opinions  in 
published  letters  of  the  time,  —  such  as  Southey's  when  he 
writes  to  Shelley,  that  the  manner  in  which  his  powers  for 
poetry  'have  been  employed  is  such  as  to  prevent  me  from 
feeling  any  desire  to  see  more  of  productions  so  monstrous  in 
their  kind,  and  pernicious  in  their  tendency,'  —  that  we  can, 
with  a  great  effort,  realise  the  aspect  under  which  Shelley  ap- 
peared to  the  people  of  his  time.  What  seems  to  us  abnormal 
in  its  innocence  was  to  them  abnormal  in  guilt ;  they  imagined 
a  revolution  behind  every  invocation  to  liberty,  and  saw  God- 
win charioted  in  the  clouds  of  '  Prometheus  Unbound.'  They 
saw  nothing  else  there,  and  Shelley  himself  had  moments  when 
he  thought  that  his  mission  was  a  prophet's  rathSfHhan  a 
poet's.  All  this,  which  would  mean  so  little  to-day,  kept  Shelley 
at  that  time  from  ever  having  an  audience  as  a  poet.  England 
still  feared  thought,  and  still  looked  upon  poetry  as  worth 
fearing. 

No  poet  has  defined  his  intentions  in  poetry  more  carefully 
than  Shelley.  '  It  is  the  business  of  the  poet,'  he  said,  in  the 
preface  to  'The  Revolt  of  Islam,'  'to  communicate  to  others 
the  pleasure  and  the  enthusiasm  arising  out  of  those  images 
and  feelings  in  the  vivid  presence  of  which,  within  his  own 
mind,  consists  at  once  his  inspiration  and  his  reward.'  But, 
he  says  further, '  I  would  only  awaken  the  feelings,  so  that  the 
reader  should  see  the  beauty  of  true  virtue,  and  be  incited  to 
those  enquiries  which  have  led  to  my  moral  and  political  creed, 
and  that  of  some  of  the  subtlest  intellects  in  the  world.'  In 
the  preface  to  'Prometheus  Unbound'  he  says,  'Didactic 
poetry  is  my  abhorrence ;  nothing  can  be  equally  well  expressed 
in  prose  that  is  not  tedious  and  supererogatory  in  vein.  My 
purpose  has  hitherto  been  simply  to  familiarise  the  highly  re- 


270     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

fined  imagination  of  the  more  select  classes  of  poetical  readers 
with  beautiful  idealisms  of  moral  excellence.'  Writing  to 
Godwin,  he  says  acutely, '  MvjDower  consists  in  sympathy,  and 
tj^at  part  of  the  imagination  wdufifa  Hates  to  sentiment  and 
contemplation.  ...  I  am  formed  ...  to  apprehend  minute 
and  remote  distinctions  of  feeling,  wnoFJhTBr"  relativeTo  external 
nature  or  the  living  beings  which  surround  us,  and  to  commu- 
nicate the  conceptions  which  result  from  considering  either  the 
moral  or  the  material  universe  as  a  whole.'  And  we  are  told 
by  Mrs.  Shelley  that '  he  said  that  he  deliberated  at  one  time 
whether  he  should  dedicate  himself  to  poetry  or  metaphysics.! 
Shelley  was  born  to  be  a  poet,  and  his  '  passion  for  reforming 
the  world,'  as  well  as  what  he  fancied  to  be  his  turn  for  meta- 
physics, were  both  part  of  a  temperament  and  intelligence 
perhaps  more  perfectly  fitted  for  the  actual  production  of 
poetry  than  those  of  any  other  poet.  All  his  life  Shelley  was  a 
dreamer;  never  a  visionary.  We  imagine  him,  like  his  Asia  on 
the  pinnacle,  saying,  — 

'my  brain 
Grows  dizzy:  see'st  thou  shapes  within  the  mist?' 

The  mist,  to  Shelley,  was  part  of  what  he  saw ;  he  never  saw 
anything,  in  life  or  art,  except  through  a  mist.  Blake  lived  in 
a  continual  state  of  vision,  Shelley  in  a  continual  state  of 
hallucination.  What  Blake  saw  was  what  Shelley  wanted  to 
see ;  Blake  never  dreamed,  but  Shelley  never  wakened  out  of 
that  shadow  of  a  dream  which  was  his  life. 

His  poetry  is  indeed  made  out  of  his  life ;  but  what  was  his 
life  to  Shelley?  The  least  visible  part  of  his  dreams.  As  the 
Fourth  Spirit  sings  in  '  Prometheus  Unbound,'  — 

'  Nor  seeks  nor  finds  he  mortal  blisses, 
But  feeds  on  the  aerial  kisses 
Of  shapes  that  haunt  thought's  wildernesses.' 

He  lived  with  ardour  among  ideas,  aspirations,  and  passions 
in  which  there  was  something  at  once  irresponsible  and  ab- 
stract.  HeJcllowed  every  impulse,  without  choice  orwestraint, 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  271 

with  the  abandonment  of  a  leaf  in  the  wind.  '  0  lift  me  as  a 
wave,  a  leaf,  a  cloud! '  was  his  prayer  to  the  west  wind  and  to 
every  influence.  Circumstances  meant  so  little  to  him  that  he 
was  unconscious  of  the  cruelty  of  change  to  sentiment,  and 
thus  of  the  extent  of  his  cruelty  to  women.  He  aimed  at  moj:al 
perfection,  but  was  really  of  a  perfect  aes^etic^selfishness.  He 
was  full  of  pity  and  generosity,  and  desired  the  liberation  and 
uplifting  of  humanity ;  but  humanity  was  less  real  to  him  than 
his  ownwitch  of  Atlas.  He  only  touched  human  action  and 
passion  closely  in  a  single  one  of  his  works;  and  he  said  of 
'  The  Cenci,'  '  I  don't  think  much  of  it.  My  object  was  to 
see  how  I  could  succeed  in  describing  passions  I  have  never 
felt.' 

To  Shelley  the  word  loy&  mgaj&t  sympathy,  and  that  word, 
in  that  sansfi,  nrmt^iflg  hifl  wh"1p  life  Rnd_P-.rP.pd.  Is  this  not 
why  he  could  say,  —  j| 

'  True  love  in  this  differs  from  gold  and  clay, 
That  to  divide  is  not  to  take  away'?     _       .  .       •      , 

/it  is  a  love  which  is  almost  sexless,  the  love  m  aCeZthusiastic 
youth,  or  of  his  own  hermaphrodite.  He  was  so  much  of  a  sen- 


timentalist_JJi  at  he-eorrld  conceive  of  incest  without  repug- 
nance, and^be^s^innoc^Trtty^a^tracted  by  so  many  things 
whichpto  one  morenormally  sexual,  would  have  indicated 
perversity.  Shelley  is  not  perverse,  TmFTie  is  fascinated  by 
every  pfoHeHi  of  evil,  which  draws  him  to  contemplate  it  with 
a  child's  enquiring  wonder  of  horror.  No  poet  ever  handled 
foulness  and  horror  with  such  clean  hands  or  so  continually. 
The  early  novels  are  filled  with  tortures,  the  early  poems  pro- 
fess to  be  the  ravings  of  a  hanged  madwoman;  'Alastor' 
dwells  lingeringly  on  death, '  Queen  Mab '  and  '  The  Revolt  of 
Islam'  on  blood  and  martyrdom;  madness  is  the  centre  of 
,  'fulian  and  Maddalo,'  anda^ungeon  of  '  Rosalind  and  Helen '  ; 
the  first  act  of  '  Prometheus '  celebrates  an  unearthly  agony, 
and  '  The  Cenci '  is  a  mart  and  slaughter-house  of  souls  and 
bodies ;  while  a  comic  satire  is  made  up  wholly  out  of  the  im- 


272    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

agery  of  the  swine-trough.  Shelley  could  touch  pitch  and  be 
undefiled ;  he  writes  nobly  of  every  horror ;  but  what  is  curious 
is  that  he  should  so  persistently  seek  his  beauty  in  such  black- 
.E£SS.  That  a  law  or  tradition  existed  was  enough  for  him  to 
question  it.  He  does  so  in  the  name  of  abstract  liberty,  but 
curiosity  was  part  of  his  impulse.  A  new  Adam  in  Eden,  the 
serpent  would  have  tempted  him  before  Eve.  He  wanted  to 
'root  out  the  infamy'  of  every  prohibition,  and  would  have 
tasted  the  forbidden  fruit  without  hunger. 

And  Shelley  was  the  same  from  the  beginning.  In  the  notes 
to  '  Queen  Mab '  he  lays  down  with  immense  seriousness  the 
rules  on  which  his  life  was  really  to  be  founded.  '  Constancy 
has  nothing  virtuous  in  itself/  he  tells  us,  'independently 
of  the  pleasure  it  confers,  and  partakes  of  the  temporising 
spirit  of  vice  in  proportion  as  it  endures  tamely  moral  defects 
of  magnitude  in  the  object  of  its  indiscreet  choice.'  Again: 
'  The  connection  of  the  sexes  is  so  long  sacred  as  it  contributes 
to  the  comfort  of  both  parties,  and  is  naturally  dissolved  when 
its  evils  are  greater  than  its  benefits.'  This  doctrine  of  'the 
comfort  of  both  parties'  was  what  Shelley  always  intended 
to  carry  out,  and  he  probably  supposed  that  it  was  always 
the  fault  of  the  '  other  party '  when  he  failed  to  do  so.  Grave 
charges  have  been  brought  against  him  for  his  cruelty  to 
women,  and  in  particular  to  Harriet;  and  it  is  impossible  to 
forgive  him,  as  a  reasonable  man,  for  his  abandonment  of 
Harriet.  But  he  was  never  at  any  time  a  reasonable  man,  and 
there  was  never  a  time  when  he  was  not  under  one  form  or 
another  of  hallucination.  It  was  not  that  he  was  carried  away 
irresistibly  by  a  gross  passion,  it  was  that  he  had  abandoned 
himself  like  a  medium  to  a  spiritual  influence.(  A  certain  self-D  •E 
ishness  is  the  inevitable  result  of  every  absorption  ;)and  Shelley, 
in  wouyiwt— piye,  was  dizzy^with  it,  whether  he  listeAd 
to  the  skylark  in  the  skyor  to  the  voice  of  Mary  calling  to  him 
from  the  next  room.  In  life,  as  in  poetry,  he  was  the  slave  of 
every  impulse,  but  a  slave  so  faultlessly  obedient  that  he  mas- 


\ 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  273 

tered  every  impulse  in  achieving  it,  so  that  his  life,  which  seems 
casual,  was  really  what  he  chose  to  make  it,  and  followed  the 
logic  of  his  being. 

Shelley_had  intuition  rather  than  instinct,  and  was  moved 
by  a  sympathy  of  the  affections  rather  than  by  passion.  His 
way  of  falling  into  and  out  of  love  is  a  sign  that  his  emotions 
{were  rapid  and  on  the  surf^ee", '  not  that  they  were  deep  or 
'permanent.  The  scent  or  music  of  love  came  to  him  like  a 
flower's  or  bird's  speech;  it  went  to  his  head,  it  did  not  seize 
on  the  heajg^Hhis  body.  It  must  have  filled  him  with  aston- 
ishment when  Harriet  drowned  herself,  and  he  could  never 
have  really  understood  that  it  was  his  fault.  He  lived  the  life 
of  one  of  those  unattached  plants  which  float  in  water;  he  had 
no  roots  in  the  earth,  and  he  did  not  see  why  any  one  should 
take  root  there.  His  love  for  women  seems  never  to  have  been 
'sensuous,  or  at  least  to  have  been  mostly  a  matter  of  sympa- 
thies and  affinities;  if  other  things  followed,  it  seemed  to  him 
natural  that  they  should,  and  he  encouraged  them  with  a  kind 
of  unconsciousness.  Emilia  Viviani,  for  whom  he  wrote  the 
sacred  love-song  of  the  'Epipsychidion,'  would  have  embar- 
rassed him,  I  doubt  not,  if  she  had  answered  his  invocation 
practically.  He  would  have  done  his  best  for  her,  and,  at  the 
same  time,  for  Mary.  , 

'  Epipsychidion  I  celebrates  love  with  an  icy  ecstasy  which 
is  the  very  life-blood  of  Shelley's  soul ;  there  are-lnoments,  at 
the  beginning  and  end,  when  its  sympathy  with  love  passes 
into  the  actual  possession.  But  for  the  most  part  it  is  a  decla- 
ration, not  an  affirmation;  its  love  is  sisterly,  and  can  be  di- 
vided ;  it  says  for  once,  exultingly  and  luxuriously  and  purely, 
the  deepest  thing  that  Shelley  had  to  say,  lets  out  the  secret 
of  his  feminine  or  twy-fold  soul,  and  is  the  epitaph  of  that 
Antigone  with  whom  '  some  of  us  have  in  a  prior  existence  been 
in  love.'  Its  only  passion  is  for  that  intellectual  beauty  to 
which  it  is  his  greater  hymn,  and,  with  Emilia  Viviani,  he  con- 
fessed to  have  been  the  Ixion  of  a  cloud.  '  I  think/  he  said  in 


274     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

a  letter,  'ojie  js  always  in  love  with  something  or  other;  the 

error,  and  I  confess  it  is  not  easy  for  spirits  cased  in  flesh  and 

blood  to  avoid  it,  consists  in  seeking  in  a  mortal  image  the 

likeness  of  what  is,  perhaps,  eternal.'    In  the  poem  he  has 

done  more  than  he  meant  to  do,  for  it  is  the  eternal  beauty 

that  it  images  for  us,  and  no  mortal  lineaments.  Just  because 

it  is  without  personal  passion,  because  it  is  the  worship  of  a 

shadow  for  a  shadow,  it  has  come  to  be  this  thing  fearfully  and 

wonderfully  made,  into  which  the  mystical  passion  of  Crashaw 

and  the  passionate  casuistry  of  Donne  seem  to  have  passed  as 

into  a  crucible :  — 

'  Thou  art  the  wine  whose  drunkenness  is  all 
We  can  desire,  O  Love ! ' 

and  the  draught  is  an  elixir  for  all  lovers. 

That  part  of  himself  which  Shelley  did  not  put  into  '  Epipsy- 
chidion'  he  put  into  'Adonais.'  In  that  pageantry  of  sorrow, 
in  which  all  temporal  things  mourn  for  the  poet,  and  accept 
the  consolation  of  eternity,  there  is  more  of  personal  con- 
fession, more  of  personal  foreboding,  than  of  grief  for  Keats, 
who  is  no  less  a  cloud  to  him  than  Emilia  Viviani,  and  whom 
indeed  we  know  he  did  not  in  any  sense  properly  appreciate, 
at  his  actual  value.  The  subtlest  beauty  comes  into  it  when 
he  speaks  of  himself,  'a  pardlike  spirit  beautiful  and  swift/ 
with  that  curious  self-sympathy  which  remains  not  less  ab- 
stract than  his  splendid  and  consoling  Pantheism,  which  shows 
by  figures  a  real  faith  in  the  truth  and  permanence  of  beauty. 
Shelley  says  of  it  and  justly,  'it  is  a  highly  wrought  piece  of 
art,  and  perhaps  better,  in  point  of  composition,  than  any- 
thing I  have  written.'  The  art  is  conscious,  and  recreates 
'Lycidas'  with  entire  originality;  but  the  vessel  of  ancient 
form  carries  a  freshly  lighted  flame. 

Shelley,  when  he  died,  left  unfinished  a  splendid  fragment, 
'  The  Triumph  of  Life,'  which,  inspired  by  Petrarch,  as  '  Ado- 
nais '  was  inspired  by  Milton,  shows  the  deeper  influence  of 
Dante.    It  ends  with  an  interrogation,  that  interrogation 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  275 

which  he  had  always  asked  of  life  and  was  about  to  ask  of 
death.  He  had  wanted  to  die,  that  he  might '  solve  the  great 
mysterj'.'  His  last  poem  comes  to  us  with  no  solution,  but 
breaks  off  as  if  he  died  before  he  could  finish  telling  the  secret 
which  he  was  in  the  act  of  apprehending. 


There  are  two  kinds  of  imagination,  that  which  embodies 
and  that  which  disembodies.  Shelley's  is  that  which  disem- 
bodies, filling  mortal  things  with  unearthly  essences  or  veil- 
ing them  with  unearthly  raiment.  Wordsworth's  imagination 
embodies,  concentrating  spirit  into  man,  and  nature  into  a 
wild  flower.  Shelley  is  never  more  himself  than  in  the  fan- 
tasy of  'The  Witch  of  Atlas/  which  he  wrote  in  three  days, 
and  which  is  a  song  in  seventy-eight  stanzas.  It  is  a  glittering 
cobweb,  hung  on  the  horns  of  the  moon's  crescent,  and  left  to 
swing  in  the  wind  there.  What  Fletcher  would  have  shown 
and  withdrawn  in  a  single  glimpse  of  magic,  Shelley  calls  up 
in  a  vast  wizard  landscape  which  he  sets  steadily  before  us. 
He  is  the  enchanter,  but  he  never  mistakes  the  images 
which  he  calls  up  for  realities.  They  are  images  to  him,  and 
there  is  always  between  him  and  them  the  thin  circle  of 
the  ring.  In  'Prometheus  Unbound,'  where  he  has  made  a 
mythology  of  his  own  by  working  on  the  stable  foundation  of 
a  great  myth  of  antiquity,  his  drama  is  a  cloudy  procession 
of  phantoms,  seen  in  a  divine  hallucination  by  a  poet  whose 
mind  hovered  always  in  that  world  — 

'where  do  inhabit 
The  shadows  of  all  forms  that  think  and  live 
Till  death  unite  them,  and  they  part  no  more; 
Dreams  and  the  light  imaginings  of  men, 
And  all  that  faith  creates  or  love  desires, 
Terrible,  strange,  sublime,  and  beauteous  shapes.' 

The  shapes  hover,  pause,  and  pass  on  unflagging  wings.  They 
are  not  symbols,  they  are  not  embodiments  of  powers  and 


276    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

passions;  they  are  shining  or  shadowy  images  of  life  and  death, 
time  and  eternity;  they  are  much  more  immaterial  than  judg- 
ment or  mercy,  than  love  or  liberty;  they  are  phantoms, 
'  wrapped  in  sweet  sounds  as  in  bright  veils/  who  pass,  mur- 
muring '  intelligible  words  and  music  wild  ' ;  but  their  music 
comes  from  somewhere  across  the  moon  or  under  the  sea, 
and  their  words  are  without  human  passion.  The  liberty 
which  comes  to  Prometheus  is  a  liberty  to  dream  forever 
with  Asia  in  a  cave;  the  love  which  sets  free  the  earth  is, 
like  the  music,  extra-lunar;  this  new  paradise  is  a  heaven 
made  only  for  one  who  is,  like  Shelley,  — 

'  the  Spirit  of  wind 
With  lightning  eyes,  and  eager  breath,  and  feet 
Disturbing  not  the  drifted  snow.' 

The  imagination  which  built  this  splendid  palace  out  of  clouds, 
of  sunset  and  sunrise,  out  of  air,  water,  and  fire,  has  unbodied 
the  human  likeness  in  every  element,  and  made  the  spirit  of 
the  earth  itself  only  a  melodious  voice, '  the  delicate  spirit '  of 
an  eternal  cloud,  'guiding  the  earth  through  heaven.'  When 
the  'universal  sound  like  wings'  is  heard,  and  Demogorgon 
affirms  the  final  triumph  of  good,  it  is  to  an  earth  dying  like  a 
drop  of  dew  and  to  a  moon  shaken  like  a  leaf.  And  we  are 
left  '  dizzy  as  with  delight,'  to  rise,  like  Panthea,  — 

'  as  from  a  bath  of  sparkling  water, 
A  bath  of  azure  light,  among  dark  rocks, 
Out  of  the  stream  of  sound.' 

It  was  among  these  forms  of  imagination,  — 

'  Desires  and  adorations, 
Winged  Persuasions  and  veiled  Destinies, 
Splendours,  and  Glooms,  and  glimmering  Incarnations 
Of  hopes  and  fears,  and  twilight  Phantasies, — ' 

as  he  sees  them  in  '  Adonais,'  that  Shelley  most  loved  to  walk; 
but  when  we  come  to  what  Browning  calls  'the  unrivalled 
"4Cenci," '  we  are  in  another  atmosphere,  and  in  this  atmosphere, 
not  his  own,  he  walks  with  equal  certainty.    In  the  preface 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  277 

to  '  The  Cenci '  Shelley  defines  in  a  perfect  image  the  quality  of 
dramatic  imagination.  '  Imagination/  he  says,  '  is  as  the  im- 
mortal God  which  should  assume  flesh  for  the  redemption 
of  mortal  passion.'  And,  in  the  dedication,  he  distinguishes 
it  from  his  earlier  works,  !  visions  which  impersonate  my  own 
apprehensions  of  the  beautiful  and  the  just.'  'The  Cenci'  is 
the  greatest  play  written  in  English  since  'The  Duchess  of 
Malfy,'  but,  in  the  work  of  Shelley,  it  is  an  episode,  an  aside, 
or,  as  he  puts  it  in  his  curious  phrase,  '  a  work  of  art.'  '  Julian 
and  Maddalo '  is  not  less  a  work  of  art,  and,  for  Shelley,  an 
exception.  In  '  Julian  and  Maddalo '  and  in  the  '  Letter  to 
Maria  Gisbome '  he  has  solved  the  problem  of  the  poem  which 
shall  be  conventional  speech  and  yet  pure  poetry.  It  is  aston- 
ishing to  think  that '  Julian  and  Maddalo '  was  written  within  a 
year  of  'Rosalind  and  Helen.'  The  one  is  Byron  and  water,  but 
the  other  is  Byron  and  fire.  It  has  set  the  pattern  of  the  mod- 
ern poem,  and  it  was  probably  more  difficult  for  him  to  do  than 
to  write  'Prometheus  Unbound.'  He  went  straight  on  from 
the  one  to  the  other,  and  was  probably  unconscious  quite  how 
much  he  had  done.  Was  it  that  a  subject,  within  his  personal 
interests  and  yet  of  deep  significance,  came  to  him  from  his 
visit  to  Byron  at  Venice,  his  study  of  Byron's  mind  there, 
which,  as  we  know,  possessed,  seemed  to  overweigh  him? 
Shelley  required  no  impetus,  but  he  required  weight.  Just 
as  the  subject  of  'Prometheus  Unbound,'  an  existing  myth 
into  which  he  could  read  the  symbol  of  his  own  faith,  gave 
him  that  definite  unshifting  substance  which  he  required,  and 
could  not  invent,  so,  no  doubt,  this  actual  substance  in  '  Julian 
and  Maddalo'  and  the  haunting  historic  substance  of  'The 
Cenci'  possessed  him,  drawing  him  down  out  of  the  air,  and 
imprisoning  him  among  human  fortunes.  There  is  no  doctrine 
and  no  fantasy  in  either,  but  imagination  speaking  human 
speech. 

And  yet,  as  Browning  has  pointed  out,  though  'Prome- 
theus,' '  Epipsychidion,'  and  the  lyrics  are  '  the  less  organised 


278     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

matter/  the  '  radiant  elemental  foam  and  solution '  of  Shelley's 
genius,  it  is  precisely  in  these,  and  not  in  any  of  the  more  hu- 
man works,  that  we  must  look  for  the  real  Shelley.  In  them  it 
is  he  himself  who  is  speaking,  in  that  'voice  which  is  contagion 
to  the  world.'  The  others  he  made,  supremely  well ;  but  these 
he  was. 

What  he  made  he  made  so  well  because  he  was  so  com- 
plete a  man  of  letters,  in  a  sense  in  which  no  other  of  his  con- 
temporaries was.  Wordsworth,  when  he  turned  aside  from  his 
path,  wandered  helplessly  astray.  Byron  was  so  helplessly 
himself  that  when  he  wrote  plays  he  wrote  them  precisely  in 
the  manner  which  Shelley  rightly  protested  that  he  himself 
had  not : '  under  a  thin  veil  converting  names  and  actions  into 
cold  impersonations  of  his  own  mind.'  But  Shelley  could  make 
no  such  mistake  in  form.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  the 
drama  of  real  life  would  ever  have  become  his  natural  medium ; 
but,  having  set  himself  to  write  such  a  drama,  he  accepted 
the  laws  or  limitations  of  the  form  to  the  extent  of  saying, 
1 1  have  avoided  with  great  care,  in  writing  this  play,  the  in- 
troduction of  what  is  commonly  called  mere  poetry.'  In  so 
doing  he  produced  a  masterpiece,  but  knew  himself  too  well 
to  repeat  it. 

And  he  does  not  less  adequately  whatever  he  touches. 
Shelley  had  no  genius  for  fun  or  caricature,  but  in  '  Swellfoot 
the  Tyrant,'  in  '  Peter  Bell  the  Third,'  he  develops  a  satirical 
joke  with  exquisite  literary  skill.  Their  main  value  is  to  show 
how  well  he  could  do  the  things  for  which  he  had  no  aptitude. 
'  The  Mask  of  Anarchy  '  is  scarcely  more  important  as  a  whole, 
though  more  poignant  in  detail.  It  was  done  for  an  occasion, 
and  remains,  not  as  an  utterance,  but  for  its  temper  of  poetic 
eloquence.  Even  ' Hellas,'  which  he  called  'a  mere  improvise,' 
and  which  was  written  out  of  a  sudden  political  enthusiasm, 
is  remembered,  not  for  its  'figures  of  indistinct  and  visionary 
delineation/  but  for  its  'flowery  and  starry'  choruses.  Yet 
not  one  of  the  four  was  written  for  the  sake  of  writing  a  piece 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  279 

of  literature;  each  contains  a  condemnation,  a  dogma,  or  a 
doctrine. 

To  Shelley  doctrine  was  a  part  of  poetry;  but  then,  to  him 
doctrine  was  itself  the  voice  of  ecstasy.  He  was  inwove  not 
only  withlove,  but  wi^L-sttsdom ;  and  as  he  wished  every  one 
to  be  good  and  happy,  he  was  full  of  magics  and  panaceas, 
Demogorgons  or  Godwins,  which  would  rejuvenate  or  redeem 
the  world.  There  was  always  something  either  spiritual  or 
moral  in  his  idea  of  beauty;  he  never  conceived  of  sesthetics 
as  a  thing  apart  from  ethics ;  and  even  in  his  descriptions  he  is 
so  anxious  to  give  us  the  feeling  before  the  details,  that  the 
details  are  as  likely  as  not  to  go  out  in  a  rosy  mist. 

There  are  pictures  in  Shelley  which  remind  us  of  Turner's. 
Pure,  light  breaks  into  all  its  flours  ojmL  floods  ^he  world, 
which  may  be  earth  or^gea  or_gky,  but  is,  above  all,  rapture 
of^polour.  He  has  few  twilights  but  many  djwns ;  and  he  loves 
autumn  for  its  wild  breath  and  broken  colours.  Fire  he  plays 
with,  but  air  and  water  are  his  elements ;  thoughts  of  drown- 
ing are  in  all  his  work,  always  with  a  sense  of  strange  luxury. 
He  has,  more  than  any  poet,  Turner's  atmosphere ;  yet  seems 
rarely,  like  Turner,  to  paint  for  atmosphere.  It  is  part  of  his 
habitual  hallucination;  it  comes  to  him  with  his  vision  or 
message,  clothing  it. 

He  loved  liberty  and  justice  with  an  impersonal  passion, 
and  would  have  been  a  martyr  for  many  ideals  which  were  no 
more  to  him  than  the  substance  itself  of  enthusiasm.  He  went 
about  the  world,  desiring  universal  sympathy,  to  suffer  deli- 
cious and  poignant  thrills  of  the  soul,  and  to  be  at  once  sad 
and  happy.  In  his  feeling  for  nature  he  has  the  same  vague 
^  .  affection  and  indistinguishing  embrace  as  in  his  feeling  for 
humanity;  the  daisy,  which  was  the  eye  of  day  to  Chaucer,  is 
•  not  visible  as  a  speck  in  Shelley's  wide  landscapes ;  and  though 
in  one  of  his  subtlest  poems  he  has  noticed  '  the  slow  soft  toads 

I  out  of  damp  corners  creep,'  he  is  not  minutely  observant  of 
whatever  is  not  in  some  way  strange  or  unusual.    Even  his 


280     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

significant  phrase  about  '  the  worm  beneath  the  sod '  is  only- 
meant  as  a  figure  of  the  brain.  His  chief  nature  poem,  'The 
Skylark/  loses  the  bird  in  the  air,  and  only  realises  a  voice,  an 
'unbodied  joy' ;  and  'The  Sensitive  Plant'  is  a  fairy,  and  the 
radiant  illustration  of  '  a  modest  creed.' 

in 

//   In  a  minute  study  of  the  details  of  Shelley's  philosophy,  Mr. 

/Yeats  has  reminded  us,  'In  ancient  times,  it  seems  to  me  that 
Blake,  who  for  all  his  protest  was  glad  to  be  alive,  and  ever 
spoke  of  his  gladness,  would  have  worshipped  in  some  chapel 
of  the  Sun,  and  that  Keats,  who  accepted  life  gladly,  though 
"  with  a  delicious,  diligent  indolence,"  would  have  worshipped 
in  some  chapel  of  the  Moon,  but  that  Shelley,  who  hated  life 
because  he  sought  "  more  in  life  than  any  understood,"  would 
have  wandered,  lost  in  a  ceaseless  reverie,  in  some  chapel  of 
the  Star  of  infinite  desire.'  Is  not  Shelley's  whole  philosophy 
contained  in  that  one  line, '  the  desire  of  the  moth  for  the  star '  ? 
He  desired  impossible  things,  and  his  whole  theory  of  a  reor- 
ganization of  the  world,  in  which  anarchy  was  to  be  a  spiritual 
deliverer,  was  a  dream  of  that  golden  age  which  all  mythologies 
put  in  the  past.  It  was  not  the  Christian's  dream  of  heaven, 
nor  the  Buddhist's  of  Nirvana,  but  a  poetical  conception  of  a 
perfected  world,  in  which  innocence  was  lawless,  and  liberty 
selfless  and  love  boundless,  and  in  which  all  was  order  and 
beauty,  as  in  a  lovely  song  or  stanza,  or  the  musical  answering 
of  line  and  line  in  drama.  He  wrote  himself  down  an  atheist, 
and  Browning  thinks  that  in  heart  he  was  always  really  a 
Christian,  so  unlimited  were  his  ideals,  so  imaginary  his  para- 
dises. When  Shelley  thought  he  was  planning  the  reform  of 
the  world,  he  was  making  literature ;  and  this  is  shown  partly 
by  the  fact  that  no  theory  or  outcry  or  enthusiasm  is  ever 
strong  enough  to  break  through  the  form  which  carries  it  like 
a  light  in  a  crystal. 
The  spirit  of  Shelley  will  indeed  always  be  a  light  to  every 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  281 

seeker  after  the  things  that  are  outside  the  world.  He  found 
nothing,  he  did  not  even  name  a  new  star.  There  is  little  | 
actual  wisdom  in  his  pages,  and  his  beauty  is  not  always  al 
very  vital  kind  of  truth.  He  is  a  bird  on  the  sea,  a  sea-bird, 
a  winged  diver,  swift  and  exquisite  in  flight,  an  inhabitant  of 
land,  water,  and  sky;  and  to  watch  him  is  to  be  filled  with  joy, 
to  forget  all  mean  and  trivial  things,  to  share  a  rapture. 
Shelley  teaches  us  nothing,  leads  us  nowhere,  but  cries  and 
flies  round  us  like  a  sea-bird. 

Shelley  is  the  only  poet  who  is  really  vague,  and  he  gets 
some  of  his  music  out  of  that  quality  of  the  air.  Poetry,  to  him, 
was  an  instinctive  utterance  of  delight,  and  it  recorded  his  light- 
est or  deepest  mood  with  equal  sensitiveness.  He  is  an  un- 
conscious creator  of  joy,  and  the  mood  most  frequent  with  him 
is  the  joy  of  sadness.  His  poetry,  more  than  that  of  any  poet, 
is  the-poetry  of  the  soul,  and  nothing  in  hjg .poetry-reminds  us 
that  he  had  a  body  at  all,  except  as  a  nerve  sensitive  to  light, 
colour,  music,  and  perfume.  His  happiness  is  — 

'  To  nurse  the  image  of  unfelt  caresses 
Till  dim  imagination  just  possesses 
The  half -created  shadow/ 

and  to  come  no  nearer  to  reality.  Poetry  was  his  atmosphere, 
he  drew  his  breath  in  it  as  in  his  native  element.  Because  he  is 
the  one  perfect  illustration  of  the  poetic  nature,  as  that  nature 
is  generally  conceived,  he  has  sometimes  been  wrongly  taken 
to  be  the  greatest  of  poets.  His  greatness  may  be  questioned, 
not  his  authenticity. 

Shelley  could  not  write  unpoetically.  Wordsworth,  who 
is  not  more  possessed  than  Shelley  with  ideas  of  instruction, 
moral  reformation,  and  the  like,  drops  constantly  out  of  poetry 
into  prose;  Shelley  never  does.  Not  only  verse  but  poetry 
came  to  him  so  naturally  that  he  could  not  keep  it  out,  and 
the  least  fragment  he  wrote  has  poetry  in  it.  Compare  him, 
not  only  with  Wordsworth,  but  with  Keats,  Coleridge,  Byron, 
Landor,  with  every  poet  of  his  period,  and  you  will  find  that 


282    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

while  others  may  excel  him  in  almost  every  separate  poetical 
quality,  none  comes  near  him  in  this  constant  level  of  general 
poetical  excellence. 

Is  it  an  excellence  or  an  acquirement?  No  doubt  it  was 
partly  technique,  the  technique  of  the  born  executant.  It  is 
too  often  forgotten  that  technique,  like  talent,  must  be  born, 
not  made,  if  it  is  to  do  great  work.  Shelley  could  not  help 
writing  well,  whatever  he  wrote;  he  was  born  to  write.  He 
was  the  one  perfectly  equipped  man  of  letters  of  his  circle,  and 
he  added  that  accomplishment  to  his  genius  as  a  poet.  There 
was  nothing  he  could  not  do  with  verse  as  a  form,  and  his 
translations  from  Greek,  from  Spanish,  or  from  German,  are 
not  less  sensitive  to  the  forms  which  he  adapted.  He  had  a 
sound  and  wide  literary  culture,  and,  with  curious  lack  of 
knowledge,  a  generalised  appreciation  of  art.  He  wrote  a 
'Defence  of  Poetry'  which  goes  far  beyond  Sidney's  and  is 
the  most  just  and  noble  eulogy  of  poetry  that  exists.  His 
letters  have  grace  and  facility,  and  when  Matthew  Arnold 
made  his  foolish  joke  about  his  prose  being  better  than  his 
verse  (which  is  as  untrue  as  to  say  that  Milton's  prose  was 
better  than  his  verse) ,  he  was  no  doubt  rightly  conscious  that 
Shelley  might  have  expressed  in  prose  much  of  the  actual 
contents  of  his  poetry.  What  would  have  been  lost  is  the  rarest 
part  of  it,  in  its  creation  of  imaginative  beauty.  It  is  that  rare 
part,  that  atmosphere  which  belongs  to  a  region  beyond  tech- 
nique, which,  more  certainly  than  even  his  technique,  was 
what  never  left  him,  what  made  it  impossible  for  him  to  write 
unpoetically. 

No  poetry  is  more  sincere  than  Shelley's,  because  his  style 
is  a  radiant  drapery  clinging  closely  to  the  body  which  it  cov- 
ers. What  he  has  to  express  may  have  little  value  or  coher- 
ence, but  it  is  the  very  breath  of  his  being,  or,  it  may  be,  the 
smoke  of  that  breath.  He  says  rightly,  in  one  of  his  earliest 
prefaces,  that  he  has  imitated  no  one,  '  designing  that  even 
if  what  I  have  produced  be  worthless,  it  should  still  be  prop- 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  283 

erly  my  own.'  There  is  no  poet,  ancient  or  modern,  whom 
he  did  not  study;  but,  after  the  first  boyish  bewitchment 
by  what  was  odd  in  Southey's  'Thalaba/  and  a  casual  influ- 
ence here  and  there,  soon  shaken  off,  whatever  came  to  him 
was  transformed  by  his  inner  energy,  and  became  his  own. 
Every  poem,  whatever  else  it  is,  is  a  personal  expression  of 
feeling.  There  is  no  egoism  of  the  passionate  sort,  Catullus's 
or  Villon's ;  his  own  passions  are  almost  impersonal  to  him, 
they  turn  to  a  poem  in  the  mere  act  of  giving  voice  to  them- 
selves.' It  is  his  sincerity  that  so  often  makes  him  superficial. 
Shelley  is  youth.  Great  ideas  or  deep  emotions  did  not  come 
to  him,  but  warm  ideas  and  eager  emotions,  and  he  put  them 
straight  into  verse.  You  cannot  imagine  him  elaborating  a 
mood,  carving  it,  as  Keats  does,  on  the  marble  flanks  of  his 
Grecian  urn. 

Shelley  is  the  most  spontaneous  of  poets,  and  one  of  the 
,  most  careless  among  those  who,  unlike  Byron,  are  artists.  He 
sings  naturally,  without  hesitation,  liquidly,  not  always  flaw- 
lessly. There  is  something  in  him  above  and  below  literature, 
something  aside  from  it,  a  divine  personal  accident.  (His  tech- 
nique, in  lyrics,  is  not  to  be  compared  with  Coleridge's,  but 
where  Keats  speaksiie  singsTJ 

The  blank  verse  of  Shelley,  at  its  best  in  '  Prometheus  Un- 
bound/ has  none  of  the  sweetly  broken  music  of  Shakespeare 
or  of  the  organ  harmonies  of  Milton.  It  is  a  music  of  aerial 
eloquence,  as  if  sounded  by  — 

'The  small,  clear,  silver  lute  of  the  young  spirit 
That  sits  i'  the  morning  star.' 

There  is  in  it  a  thrilling  music,  rarer  in  liquid  sound  than  that 
of  any  other  poet,  and  chastened  by  all  the  severity  that  can 
•clothe  a  spirit  of  fire  and  air,  an  Ariel  loosed  from  Prospero. 
Can  syllables  turn  to  more  delicate  sound  and  perfume  than 
in  such  lines  as  these :  — 

'  When  swift  from  the  white  Scythian  wilderness 
A  wind  swept  forth  wrinkling  the  Earth  with  frost : 
I  looked  and  all  the  blossoms  were  blown  down'? 


284    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

If  words  can  breathe,  can  they  breathe  a  purer  breath  than 
in  these  strange  and  simple  lines  in  which  every  consonant 
and  every  vowel  have  obeyed  some  learned  spell  unconscious 
of  its  witchcraft?  Horror  puts  on  all  the  daintiness  of  beauty, 
losing  none  of  its  own  essence,  as  when  we  read  how  — 

'foodless  toads 
Within  voluptuous  chambers  panting  crawled.' 

And  out  of  this  '  music  of  lyres  and  flutes '  there  rises  a  sym- 
phony of  many  instruments,  a  choral  symphony,  after  which 
no  other  music  sounds  for  a  time  musical.  Nor  is  it  only  for 
its  music  — 

'Clear,  silver,  icy,  keen,  awakening  tones 
Which  pierce  the  sense  and  live  within  the  soul  — ' 

that  this  blank  verse  has  its  power  over  us.  It  has  an  illumined 
gravity,  a  shining  crystal  clearness,  a  luminous  motion,  with, 
in  its  ample  tide,  an  'ocean-like  enchantment  of  strong  sound,' 
and  a  measure  and  order  as  of  the  paces  of  the  boundless  and 
cadenced  sea. 

f  But  it  is,  after  all,  for  his  lyrics  that  Shelley  is  best  remem- 
bered, and  it  is  perhaps  in  them  that  he  is  at  his  best.  He 
wrote  no  good  lyrical  verse,  except  a  few  stanzas,  before  the 
age  of  twenty-three,  when  he  wrote  the  song  beginning,  '  The 
cold  earth  slept  below/  in  which  we  find,  but  for  a  certain 
concentration,  all  the  poetic  and  artistic  qualities  of  '  A  widow 
bird  sat  mourning  for  her  love,'  which  belongs  to  the  last  year 
of  his  life.  In  the  summer  of  the  year  1816  he  wrote  the 
'Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty,'  and  had  nothing  more  to 
learn.  In  a  letter  to  Keats  he  said,  '  In  poetry  I  have  sought 
to  avoid  system  and  mannerism,'  and  in  the  lyrical  work 
written  during  the  six  remaining  years  of  his  life  there  will  be 
found  a  greater  variety,  a  more  easily  and  continually  inven- 
tive genius,  than  in  the  lyrical  work  of  any  other  English  poet. 
This  faculty  which  came  to  him  without  warning,  like  an 
awakening,  never  flags,  and  it  is  only  for  personal,  not  for 


PERCY  BYSSHE  SHELLEY  285 

artistic  reasons,  that  it  ever  exercises  itself  without  a  continual 
enchantment.  There  are,  among  these  supreme  lyrics,  which 
no  one  but  Shelley  could  have  either  conceived  or  written, 
others,  here  and  there,  in  which  the  sentimentalist  which  was 
in  Shelley  the  man  improvises  in  verse  as  Thomas  Moore  would 
have  improvised  if  he  could.  He  could  not;  but  to  compare 
with  his  best  lyrics  a  lyric  of  Shelley's  such  as,  'The  keen  stars 
were  twinkling/  is  to  realise  how  narrow,  as  well  as  how  im- 
passable, is  the  gulf  between  what  is  not,  and  what  just  is, 
poetry.  In  the  clamorous  splendour  of  the  odes  there  is  some- 
times rhetoric  as  well  as  poetry,  but  is  it  more  than  the  tumult 
and  overflow  of  that  poetry?  For  spiritual  energy  the  'Ode 
to  the  West  Wind,'  for  untamable  choric  rapture  the  '  Hymn 
to  Pan,'  for  soft  brilliance  of  colour  and  radiant  light  the  '  Lines 
written  among  the  Euganean  Hills,'  are  not  less  incomparable 
than  the  rarest  of  the  songs  (such  songs  as  'The  golden  gates 
of  sleep  unbar,'  or  'When  the  lamp  is  shattered,'  or  'Swiftly 
walk  over  the  western  wave '),  in  which  the  spirit  of  Fletcher 
seems  returned  to  earth  with  a  new  magic  from  beyond  the 
moon.  And  all  this  work,  achieved  by  a  craftsman  as  if  for  its 
own  sake,  will  be  found,  if  read  chronologically,  with  its  many 
fragments,  to  be  in  reality  a  sort  of  occasional  diary.  If  ever  i 
a  poet  expressed  himself  fully  in  his  verse,  it  was  Shelley.  * 
There  is  nothing  in  his  life  which  you  will  not  find  written 
somewhere  in  it,  if  only  as  'the  ghost  of  a  forgotten  form  of 
sleep.'  In  this  diary  of  lyrics  he  has  noted  down  whatever  most 
moved  him,  in  a  vivid  record  of  the  trace  of  every  thrill  or 
excitement,  on  nerves,  or  sense,  or  soul.  From  the  stanzas, 
'To  Constantia  singing,'  to  the  stanzas,  'With  a  guitar,  to 
Jane,'  every  woman  who  moved  him  will  have  her  place  in  it; 
and  everything  that  has  moved  him  when,  as  he  said  in  the 
preface  to  'The  Revolt  of  Islam,'  'I  have  sailed  down  mighty 
rivers,  and  seen  the  sun  rise  and  set,  and  the  stars  come  forth 
whilst  I  have  sailed  night  and  day  down  a  rapid  stream  among 
mountains.'  This,  no  doubt,  is  his  way  of  referring  to  the  first 


286    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  second  travels  abroad  with  Mary,  and  to  the  summer 
when  he  sailed  up  the  Thames  to  its  source,  —  the  time  of  hie 
awakening.  And  in  all  this,  made  day  by  day  out  of  the  very 
substance  of  its  hours,  there  will  not  be  a  single  poem  in  which 
the  occasion  will  disturb  or  overpower  the  poetical  impulse, 
in  which  the  lyrical  cry  will  be  personal  at  the  expense  of  the 
music.  Or,  if  there  is  one  such  poem,  it  is  that  most  intimate 
one  which  begins:  'The  serpent  is  shut  out  of  Paradise.'  Is 
there,  in  this  faultless  capacity,  this  inevitable  transposition 
of  feeling  into  form,  something  lacking,  some  absent  savour? 
Is  there,  in  this  evocation  of  the  ghost  of  every  thrill,  the 
essence  of  life  itself? 


REV.  JOHN  KEBLE   (1792- 


Dean  Stanley,  wishing  to  praise  Keble,  tells  us  that  it  was 
Southey,  more  than  all,  who  '  kindled  his  flame  and  coloured 
his  diction.'  The  influence  of  that  bad  model  is  indeed  visible 
in  much  that  is  rhetorical  in  Keble.  There  is  something  in 
his  best  poems  which  has  a  neatness  of  epithet,  a  personal  way 
of  putting  piety  into  verse,  by  which  he  may  for  a  moment 
seem  to  become  a  poet.  But  his  piety  was  no  burning  flame  of  a 
Crashaw,  his  Anglican  mind  was  tied  down  from  any  of  the 
higher  flights  of  religious  ecstasy.  He  can  be  read,  not  with- 
out respect,  sometimes  with  pleasure,  never  with  satisfied 
delight. 

DR.  WILLIAM  MAGINN  (1793-1842) 2 

'  Bright,  broken  Maginn '  was  in  his  time  a  notorious  writer 
of  satirical  prose  and  verse;  he  is  remembered  now  chiefly 

1  (1)  The  Christian  Year,  2  vols.,  1827.  (2)  The  Psalter,  or  Psalms  of 
David  in  English  Verse,  1839.  (3)  Lyra  Innocentium,  1846.  (4)  Miscel- 
laneous Poems,  posthumous,  1869. 

2  (1)  Homeric  Ballads,  1850.  (2)  Miscellanies,  5  vols.,  New  York,  1855- 
57.   (3)  Miscellanies:  Prose  and  Verse,  2  vols.,  London,  1885. 


DR.  WILLIAM  MAGINN  287 

because  Lockhart,  in  his  epitaph,  perpetuated  a  passing  name 
on  the  barb  of  a  kindly  jest.  He  was  a  scholar  and  a  wit,  a 
disorderly,  untrustworthy  person ;  his  facility  was  apt  to  pass 
into  vulgarity,  and  he  has  left  nothing  of  really  permanent 
value.  But  flhere  was  hardly  anything  that  he  could  not  do. 
He  invented  a  ballad  metre  for  the  translation  of  Homer, 
which  no  one  has  quite  known  whether  to  take  seriously  or 
not;  and  set  Lucian's  dialogues,  with  better  skill,  into  come- 
dies in  English  blank  verse.  A  few  of  his  short  stories  are 
striking:  'The  Man  in  the  Bell'  is  almost  like  another  version 
of  'The  Pit  and  the  Pendulum/  though  not  so  intense  in  its 
horror ;  '  Bob  Burke's  Duel  with  Ensign  Brady '  is  a  master- 
piece of  Irish  humour.  Prose  bursts  into  verse  on  every  page, 
and  his  easy,  careless,  inaccurate  mastery  of  comic  metre  is 
marvellous  of  its  kind,  and  delights  us  by  the  mere  rollicking 
sound  of  it.  'Captain  Godolphin  was  a  very  odd  and  stingy 
man '  might  be  taken  for  the  original  of  some  of  the  puns  and 
processes  of  metre  in  the  'Bab  Ballads/  while  not  even  in 
'Alice  in  Wonderland'  is  there  a  finer  invention  of  nonsense 
names  than  in  this  refrain :  — 

'Oh!  the  Powldoodies  of  Burran, 
The  green  green  Powldoodies  of  Burran, 
The  green  Powldoodies,  the  clean  Powldoodies, 
The  gaping  Powldoodies  of  Burran ! ' 

Maginn  parodied  all  his  contemporaries;  and  while  some, 
like  the  venomous  onslaught  on  '  Adonais'  and  the  vulgar  trav- 
esty of  'Christabel/  are  indefensibly  brutal,  others,  without 
the  malice  or  dullness  of  these,  have  a  fine  humour  and  insight 
of  their  own.  He  wrote  them  in  English,  Latin,  and  Greek, 
and  his  version  of  'Chevy  Chase'  is  a  piece  of  delicious  dog- 
Latin.  I  must  give  Lockhart's  epitaph,  which  is  more  ade- 
quate than  any  criticism :  — 

'  Here,  early  to  bed,  lies  kind  William  Maginn, 
Who  with  genius,  wit,  learning,  life's  trophies  to  win, 
Had  neither  great  lord,  nor  rich  cit  of  his  kin, 
Nor  discretion  to  set  himself  up  as  to  tin : 


288    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

So,  his  portion  soon  spent,  like  the  poor  heir  of  Lynn, 
He  turn'd  author  while  yet  was  no  beard  on  his  chin ; 
And  whoever  was  out,  or  whoever  was  in, 
For  your  Tories  his  fine  Irish  brains  he  would  spin, 
Who  received  prose  and  rhyme  with  a  promising  grin  — 
"Go  ahead,  you  queer  fish,  and  more  power  to  your  fin!" 
But  to  save  from  starvation  stirr'd  never  a  pin. 
Light  for  long  was  his  heart,  though  his  breeches  were  thin, 
Else  his  acting  for  certain  was  equal  to  Quin : 
But  at  last  he  was  beat,  and  sought  help  from  the  bin 
(All  the  same  to  the  Doctor,  from  claret  to  gin), 
Which  led  swiftly  to  gaol,  with  consumption  therein; 
It  was  much,  when  the  bones  rattled  loose  in  his  skin, 
He  got  leave  to  die  here,  out  of  Babylon's  din. 
Barring  drink  and  the  girls,  I  ne'er  heard  of  a  sin: 
Many  worse,  better  few,  than  bright,  broken  Maginn.' 


JOHN  CLARE   (1793-1864)  * 

We  are  told  in  the  introduction  to  a  volume  of  poems  by- 
John  Clare,  published  in  1820,  '  They  are  the  genuine  produc- 
tions of  a  young  peasant,  a  day-labourer  in  husbandry,  who 
has  had  no  advantages  of  education  beyond  others  of  his 
class;  and  though  poets  in  this  country  have  seldom  been 
fortunate  men,  yet  he  is,  perhaps,  the  least  favoured  by  cir- 
cumstances, and  the  most  destitute  of  friends,  of  any  that 
ever  existed.'  If  the  writer  of  the  introduction  had  been  able 
to  look  to  the  end  of  the  career  on  whose  outset  he  commented, 
he  would  have  omitted  the  'perhaps.'  The  son  of  a  pauper 
farm  labourer,  John  Clare  wrote  his  earlier  poems  in  the  in- 
tervals of  hard  manual  labour  in  the  fields,  and  his  later  poems 
in  lucid  intervals  in  a  madhouse,  to  which  ill-health,  overwork, 
and  drink  had  brought  him.  In  a  poem  written  before  he  was 
seventeen  he  had  asked  that  he  might 

'  Find  one  hope  true  —  to  die  at  home  at  last,' 

1  (1)  Poems  descriptive  of  Rural  Life  and  Scenery,  1820.  (2)  The  Village 
Minstrel,  2  vols.,  1821.  (3)  The  Shepherd's  Calendar,  1827.  (4)  The  Rural 
Muse,  1835.  (5)  The  'Asylum  Poems  '  are  contained  in  the  Life  and  Re- 
mains of  John  Clare,  by  J.  E.  Cherry,  1873. 


JOHN  CLARE  289 

and  his  last  words,  when  he  died  in  the  madhouse,  were,  'I 
want  to  go  home.'  In  another  early  poem  he  had  prayed, 
seeing  a  tree  in  autumn,  that,  when  his  time  came,  the  trunk 
might  die  with  the  leaves.  Even  so  reasonable  a  prayer  was 
not  answered. 

In  Clare's  early  work,  which  is  more  definitely  the  work  of 
the  peasant  than  perhaps  any  other  peasant  poetry,  there  is 
more  reality  than  poetry. 

'  I  found  the  poems  in  the  fields, 
And  only  wrote  them  down,' 

as  he  says  with  truth,  and  it  was  with  an  acute  sense  of  the 
precise  thing  he  was  saying,  that  Lamb  complimented  him  in 
1822  on  the  '  quantity '  of  his  observation. 

No  one  before  him  had  given  such  a  sense  of  the  village, 
for  Bloomfield  does  not  count,  not  being  really  a  poet;  and 
no  one  has  done  it  so  well  since,  until  a  greater  poet,  Warner, 
brought  more  poetry  with  him.  His  danger  was  to  be  too  de- 
liberate, unconscious  that  there  can  be  choice  in  descriptive 
poetry,  or  that  anything  which  runs  naturally  into  metre 
may  not  be  the  best  material  for  a  particular  poem.  His  words 
are  for  the  most  part  chosen  only  to  be  exact,  and  he  does  not 
know  when  he  is  obvious  or  original  in  his  epithets.  The 
epithets,  as  he  goes  on,  strengthen  and  sharpen ;  in  his  earli- 
est period  he  would  not  have  thought  of  speaking  of  'bright 
glib  ice'  or  of  the  almanac's  'wisdom  gossiped  from  the 
stars.'  He  educated  himself  with  rapidity,  and  I  am  inclined 
to  doubt  the  stories  of  the  illiterate  condition  of  even  his  early 
manuscripts.  His  handwriting,  as  early  as  the  time  of  his  first 
published  book,  is  clear,  fluent,  and  energetic.  In  1821  Tay- 
lor saw  in  his  cupboard  copies  of  Burns,  Cowper,  Wordsworth, 
Coleridge,  Keats,  and  Crabbe.  And  in  a  printed  letter  of 
1826,  addressed  to  Montgomery,  Clare  says  that  he  has  '  long 
had  a  fondness  for  the  poetry  of  the  time  of  Elizabeth,'  which 
he  knows  from  Ellis's  'Specimens  of  Early  English  Poets' 
and  Ritson's  'English  Songs.'    It  was  doubtless  in  Ellis  that 


290    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

he  found  some  of  the  metres  in  which  we  may  well  be  sur- 
prised to  find  him  writing  as  early  as  1821 ;  Villon's  ballad 
metre,  for  instance,  which  he  uses  in  a  poem  in  '  The  Village 
Minstrel/  and  which  he  might  have  found  in  poems  of  Henry- 
son  and  other  Scottish  poets  quoted  in  Ellis.  Later  on,  among 
some  poems  which  he  wrote  in  deliberate  imitation  of  Eliza- 
bethan poets,  we  shall  find  one  in  a  Wyatt  metre,  which  reads 
like  an  anticipation  of  Bridges. 

Thus  it  cannot  be  said  that  in  Clare's  very  earliest  work 
we  have  an  utterance  which  literary  influences  have  not  modi- 
fied. The  impulse  and  the  subject-matter  are  alike  his  own, 
and  are  taken  directly  from  what  was  about  him.  There  is 
no  closer  attention  to  nature  than  in  Clare's  poems;  but 
the  observation  begins  by  being  literal ;  nature  a  part  of  his 
home,  rather  than  his  home  a  part  of  nature.  The  things 
about  him  are  the  whole  of  his  material,  he  does  not  choose 
them  by  preference  out  of  others  equally  available;  all  his 
poems  are  made  out  of  the  incidents  and  feelings  of  humble 
life  and  the  actual  fields  and  flowers  of  his  particular  part  of 
England.  He  does  not  make  pictures,  which  would  imply 
aloofness  and  selection ;  he  enumerates,  which  means  a  friendly 
knowledge.  It  is  enough  for  him,  enough  for  his  success  in  his 
own  kind  of  poetry,  to  say  them  over,  saying, '  Such  they  were, 
and  I  loved  them  because  I  had  always  seen  them  so.' 

Yet  his  nerves  were  not  the  nerves  of  a  peasant.  Every- 
thing that  touched  him  was  a  delight  or  an  agony,  and  we 
hear  continually  of  his  bursting  into  tears.  He  was  restless 
and  loved  wandering,  but  he  came  back  always  to  the  point 
from  which  he  had  started.  He  could  not  endure  that  any- 
thing he  had  once  known  should  be  changed.  He  writes  to 
tell  his  publisher  that  the  landlord  is  going  to  cut  down  two 
elm-trees  at  the  back  of  his  hut,  and  he  says:  'I  have  been 
several  mornings  to  bid  them  farewell.'  He  kept  his  reason 
as  long  as  he  was  left  to  starve  and  suffer  in  that  hut,  and 
when  he  was  taken  from  it,  though  to  a  better  dwelling,  he 


JOHN  CLARE  291 

lost  all  hold  on  himself.  He  was  torn  up  by  the  roots,  and 
the  flower  of  his  mind  withered.  What  this  transplanting  did 
for  him  is  enough  to  show  how  native  to  him  was  his  own  soil, 
and  how  his  songs  grew  out  of  it. 

In  the  last  book  published  before  he  entered  the  asylum, 
'The  Rural  Muse,'  he  repeated  all  his  familiar  notes  with  a 
fluency  which  long  practice  had  given  him,  and  what  he  gains 
in  ease  he  loses  in  directness.  All  that  remains  to  us  of  his 
subsequent  work  is  contained  in  the  'Asylum  Poems,'  first 
printed  in  1873;  and  it  is  to  be  regretted  that  the  too  scrupu- 
lous editor,  Mr.  Cherry,  did  not  print  them  as  they  stood. 
'  Scarcely  one  poem,'  he  tells  us,  'was  found  in  a  state  in  which 
it  could  be  submitted  to  the  public  without  more  or  less  of 
revision  and  correction.'  It  is  in  these  poems  that,  for  the 
first  time,  Clare's  lyrical  quality  gets  free.  Strangely  enough, 
a  new  joy  comes  into  the  verse,  as  if  at  last  he  is  at  rest.  It 
is  only  rarely,  in  this  new  contentment,  this  solitude  even 
from  himself,  that  recollection  returns.  Then  he  remembers  — 

'  I  am  a  sad  lonely  hind : 
Trees  tell  me  so,  day  after  day, 
As  slowly  they  wave  in  the  wind.' 

He  seems  to  accept  nature  now  more  easily,  because  his  mind 
is  in  a  kind  of  oblivion  of  everything  else ;  madness  being,  as 
it  were,  his  security.  He  writes  love  songs  that  have  an  airy 
fancy,  a  liquid  and  thrilling  note  of  song.  They  are  mostly 
exultations  of  memory,  which  goes  from  Mary  to  Patty,  and 
thence  to  a  gipsy  girl  and  to  vague  Isabellas  and  Scotch  maids. 
A  new  feeling  for  children  comes  in,  sometimes  in  songs  of 
childish  humour,  like  'Little  Trotty  Wagtail'  or  'Clock-a- 
Clay,'  made  out  of  bright,  laughing  sound ;  and  once  in  a  lovely 
poem,  one  of  the  most  nearly  perfect  he  ever  wrote,  called 
'The  Dying  Child,'  which  reminds  one  of  beautiful  things  that 
have  been  done  since,  but  of  nothing  done  earlier.  As  we 
have  them  (and  so  subtle  an  essence  could  scarcely  be  ex- 
tracted by  any  editor)  there  is  no  insanity;  they  have  only 


292     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

dropped  nearly  all  of  the  prose.  A  gentle  hallucination  comes 
in  from  time  to  time,  and,  no  doubt,  helps  to  make  the  poetry- 
better. 

It  must  not  be  assumed  that  because  Clare  is  a  peasant, 
his  poetry  is  in  every  sense  typically  peasant  poetry.  He  was 
gifted  for  poetry  by  those  very  qualities  which  made  him  in- 
effectual as  a  peasant.  The  common  error  about  him  is  re- 
peated by  Mr.  Lucas  in  his  life  of  Lamb:  'He  was  to  have 
been  another  Burns,  but  succeeded  only  in  being  a  better 
Bloomfield.'  The  difference  between  Clare  and  Bloomfield  is 
the  difference  between  what  is  poetry  and  what  is  not,  and 
neither  is  nearer  to  or  farther  from  being  a  poet  because  he 
was  also  a  peasant.  The  difference  between  Burns  and  Clare 
is  the  difference  between  two  kinds  and  qualities  of  poetry. 
Burns  was  a  great  poet,  filled  with  ideas,  passions,  and  every 
sort  of  intoxication;  but  he  had  no  such  minute  local  love 
as  Clare,  nor,  indeed,  so  deep  a  love  of  the  earth.  He  could 
create  by  naming,  while  Clare,  who  lived  on  the  memory 
of  his  heart,  had  to  enumerate,  not  leaving  out  one  detail, 
because  he  loved  every  detail.  Burns  or  Hogg,  however, 
we  can  very  well  imagine  at  any  period  following  the 
plough  with  skill  or  keeping  cattle  with  care.  But  Clare  was 
never  a  good  labourer ;  he  pottered  in  the  fields  feebly,  he  tried 
fruitless  way  after  way  of  making  his  living.  What  was 
strangely  sensitive  in  him  might  well  have  been  hereditary 
if  the  wild  and  unproved  story  told  by  his  biographer  Martin 
is  true :  that  his  father  was  the  illegitimate  son  of  a  nameless 
wanderer,  who  came  to  the  village  with  his  fiddle,  saying  he 
was  a  Scotchman  or  an  Irishman,  and  taught  in  the  village 
school,  and  disappeared  one  day  as  suddenly  as  he  had  come. 
The  story  is  at  least  symbolic,  if  not  true.  That  wandering 
and  strange  instinct  was  in  his  blood,  and  it  spoiled  the  pea- 
sant in  him  and  made  the  poet. 


FELICIA  DOROTHEA  HEMANS  293 


FELICIA  DOROTHEA  HEMANS   (1793-1835) * 

It  was  said  at  the  time  of  Mrs.  Hemans'  death  that  she  had 
'founded  a  school  of  imitators  in  England,  and  a  yet  larger 
one  in  America.'  'So  general  has  been  the  attention/  it  was 
said  in  America,  'to  those  of  her  pieces  adapted  to  the  pur- 
poses of  a  newspaper,  we  hardly  fear  to  assert  that  throughout 
a  great  part  of  this  country  there  is  not  a  family  of  the  mid- 
dling class  in  which  some  of  them  have  not  been  read.'  And 
the  same  writer  assures  us  that  'the  voice  of  America,  deciding 
on  the  literature  of  England,  resembles  the  voice  of  posterity 
more  nearly  than  anything  else  that  is  contemporaneous  can 
do.'  Has  the  voice  of  posterity,  in  this  instance,  corroborated 
the  voice  of  America? 

Out  of  the  seven  volumes  of  her  collected  works,  not  seven 
poems  are  still  remembered,  and  these  chiefly  because  they 
were  taught,  and  probably  still  are,  to  children.  There  are 
'Casablanca,'  'The  Graves  of  a  Household,'  'The  Homes  of 
England/  'The  Fall  of  d'Assas/  with  a  few  others;  these  are 
not  fundamentally  different  from  the  hundreds  of  poems  which 
have  been  forgotten,  or  which  seem  to  us  now  little  more  than 
the  liltings  of  a  kind  of  female  Moore.  But  they  have  the  merit 
of  being  not  only  very  sincere  and  very  straightforward,  but 
of  concentrating  into  themselves  a  more  definite  parcel  of  the 
floating  sensibility  of  a  woman  who  was  tremulously  awake 

1  (1)  Poems,  1808.  (2)  England  and  Spain,  1808.  (3)  Domestic  Affec- 
tions, 1812.  (4)  Translations  from  Camoens,  and  other  Poets,  1818.  (5) 
Tales  and  Historic  Scenes,  1819.  (6)  The  Meeting  of  Bruce  and  Wallace, 
1820.  (7)  The  Sceptic,  1820.  (8)  Superstition  and  Error,  1820.  (9)  Welsh 
Melodies,  1822.  (10)  The  Vespers  of  Palermo,  1823.  (11)  The  Siege  of 
Valencia,  1823.  (12)  De  Chantillon,  1823.  (13)  Lays  of  Many  Lands, 
1825.  (14)  The  Forest  Sanctuary,  1825.  (15)  Records  of  Women,  1828. 
(16)  Songs  of  the  Affections,  1830.  (17)  Hymns  on  the  Wake  of  Nature, 
1833.  (18)  Hymns  for  Childhood,  1834.  (19)  National  Lyrics  and  Songs 
for  Music,  1834.  (20)  Scenes  and  Hymns  of  Life,  1834.  (21)  Collected 
Poems,  7  vols.,  1839;  1  vol.,  1849. 


294     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

to  every  appeal  of  beauty  or  nobility.  '  The  highest  degree  of 
beauty  in  art/  she  wrote,  'certainly  always  excites,  if  not 
tears,  at  least  the  inward  feeling  of  tears.'  She  has  'a  pure 
passion  for  flowers/  and  suffers  from  the  intense  delight  of 
music,  without  which  she  feels  that  she  would  die;  the  sight 
and  society  of  Scott  or  Wordsworth  fill  her  with  an  ecstasy 
hardly  to  be  borne;  she  discovers  Carlyle  writing  anony- 
mously on  Burns  in  the  '  Edinburgh  Review '  and  she  notes : 
'  I  wonder  who  the  writer  is ;  he  certainly  gives  us  a  great  deal 
of  what  Boswell,  I  think,  calls  bark  and  steel  for  the  mind.' 
She  had  all  the  feminine  accomplishments  of  her  time,  and 
they  meant  to  her,  especially  her  harp,  some  form  of  personal 
expression.  She  wrote  from  genuine  feeling  and  with  easy 
spontaneity,  and  it  may  still  be  said  of  her  verse,  as  Lord 
Jeffrey  said  of  it :  '  It  may  not  be  the  best  imaginable  poetry, 
and  may  not  indicate  the  highest  or  most  commanding  genius, 
but  it  embraces  a  great  deal  of  that  which  gives  the  very  best 
poetry  its  chief  power  of  pleasing.' 

Its  chief  power,  that  is,  of  pleasing  the  majority.  In  spite 
of  an  origin  partly  Irish,  partly  German,  blended  with  an 
Italian  strain,  there  was  no  rarity  in  her  nature,  or  if  it  was 
there,  it  found  no  expression  in  her  poems.  She  said  of  Irish 
tunes  that  there  was  in  them  'something  unconquerable  yet 
sorrowful ' ;  but  that  something,  though  she  compared  herself 
to  an  Irish  tune,  she  never  got.  Living  much  of  her  life  in 
Wales,  and  caring  greatly  for  its  ancient  literature,  she  loses, 
in  the  improvisations  of  the  'Welsh  Melodies,'  whatever  is 
finest  and  most  elemental  in  her  Celtic  originals.  It  is  sufficient 
criticism  to  set  side  by  side  the  first  stanza  of  'The  Hall  of 
Cynddylan'  and  the  opening  of  the  poem  of  Llwarch  Hen. 
Mrs.  Hemans  says,  lightly :  — 


'  The  Hall  of  Cynddylan  is  gloomy  to-night ; 
I  weep,  for  the  grave  has  extinguished  its  light ; 
The  beam  of  the  lamp  from  its  summit  is  o'er, 
The  blaze  of  its  hearth  shall  give  welcome  no  more. 


JOHN  GIBSON  LOCKHART  295 

But  what  Lhvarch  Hen  has  said  is  this :  '  The  Hall  of  Cynd- 
dylan  is  gloomy  this  night,  without  fire,  without  bed :  I  must 
weep  awhile,  and  then  be  silent.' 

That  is  poetry,  but  the  other  is  a  kind  of  prattle.  It  is 
difficult  to  say  of  Mrs.  Hemans  that  her  poems  are  not  wo- 
manly, and  yet  it  would  be  more  natural  to  say  that  they  are 
feminine.  The  art  of  verse  to  her  was  like  her  harp  and  her 
sketch-book,  not  an  accomplishment  indeed,  but  an  instru- 
ment on  which  to  improvise.  One  of  her  disciples,  Letitia 
Landon,  imagined  that  she  was  only  speaking  in  her  favour 
when  she  said :  '  One  single  emotion  is  never  the  original  sub- 
ject' of  her  poems.  'Some  graceful  or  touching  anecdote  or 
situation  catches  her  attention,  and  its  poetry  is  developed 
in  a  strain  of  mourning  melody  and  a  vein  of  gentle  moralising.' 
Her  poems  are  for  the  most  part  touching  anecdotes ;  they  are 
never  without  some  gentle  moralising.  If  poetry  were  really 
what  the  average  person  thinks  it  to  be,  an  idealisation  of  the 
feelings,  at  those  moments  when  the  mind  is  open  to  every 
passing  impression,  ready  to  catch  at  similitudes  and  call  up 
associations,  but  not  in  the  grip  of  a  strong  thought  or  vital 
passion,  then  the  verse  of  Felicia  Hemans  would  be,  as  people 
once  thought  it  was,  the  ideal  poetry.  It  would,  however, 
be  necessary  to  go  on  from  that  conclusion  to  another,  which 
indeed  we  find  in  the  surprising  American  Professor,  who, 
'  after  reading  such  works  as  she  had  written,'  could  not  but 
perceive,  on  turning  over  'the  volumes  of  a  collection  of  Eng- 
lish poetry,  like  that  of  Chalmers,'  that  '  the  greater  part  of  it 
appears  more  worthless  and  distasteful  than  before.' 


JOHN  GIBSON  LOCKHART   (1794-1854) 1 

John  Gibson  Lockhart,  the  biographer  of  Scott,  a  fierce 
critic,  a  brilliant  prose-writer,  the  writer  of  a  remarkable 
1  Ancient  Spanish  Ballads,  1823. 


296    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

novel,  'Adam  Blair/  is  best  remembered  for  his  achievement 
as  a  translator  of  ancient  Spanish  ballads  and  songs.  'That 
old  Spanish  minstrelsy/  as  he  calls  it,  'which  has  been  pre- 
served in  the  different  Cancioneros  and  Romanceros  of  the  six- 
teenth century/  was  unknown  in  England  before  Lockhart,  in 
1823,  published  his  vivid  and  glowing  versions,  which  will 
always  have  their  place  among  the  romantic  work  of  the 
period.  He  revealed  a  whole  new  world,  in  which  chivalry  was 
lofty,  with  the  proud  dignity,  sombre  simplicity,  strange  bar- 
barity and  stranger  gentleness  of  the  Spaniard,  with,  through 
it  all,  an  Oriental  undercurrent,  the  incalculable  mystery  of 
the  Moor.  What  a  sense,  in  these  old  ballads,  which  at  times 
wail  with  the  lamenting  voice  that  one  can  still  hear  at  night 
on  any  country  road  in  Spain,  of  the  dramatic  moment,  the 
situation,  the  crisis!  The  Spanish,  as  he  says,  'is,  like  the 
sister  Italian,  music  in  itself,  though  music  of  a  bolder  char- 
acter.' This  music  Lockhart  rendered  for  the  most  part  in 
that  galloping  measure  which  so  easily  delights  men's  ears, 
and  which  is  a  living  and  moving  thing,  no  less  when  it  turns  to 
the  childlike  humour  of  '  My  ear-rings !  my  ear-rings !  they  've 
dropt  into  the  well '  or  to  the  witty  delicacy  of  some  of  the 
Moorish  songs.  There  is  one  song,  'The  Wandering  Knight's 
Song/  which  I  must  give  in  full,  for  it  anticipates,  by  nearly 
three  centuries,  a  masterpiece  of  Keats,  '  La  Belle  Dame  sans 

Merci ' :  — 

'  My  ornaments  are  arms, 
My  pastime  is  in  war, 
My  bed  is  cold  upon  the  wold, 
My  lamp  yon  star. 

'My  journeyings  are  long, 
My  slumbers  short  and  broken ; 
From  hill  to  hill  I  wander  still, 
Kissing  thy  token. 

'  I  ride  from  land  to  land, 
I  sail  from  sea  to  sea; 
Some  day  more  kind  I  fate  may  find, 
Some  night  kiss  thee.' 


THOMAS  CARLYLE  297 

After  that  nothing  that  Lockhart  wrote  in  his  own  person,  not 
even  the  song  written  to  comfort  Carlyle  in  bereavement, 
though  that  has  a  rare  twist  of  the  mind, 

'  Be  constant  to  the  dead, 
The  dead  cannot  deceive  ' ; 

not  that  even  rises  to  the  wild  and  patient  ecstasy  of  the 
Spanish  Song.  And  there  is  one  other  ballad,  of  his  own  writ- 
ing, with  its  fine  refrain  of  '  For  we  ne'er  shall  see  the  like  of 
Captain  Paton  no  mo'e ! '  which,  in  its  shedding  of  '  punch 
and  tears'  for  this  'prince  of  good  deal  fellows,'  is  splendid, 
and  not  since  excelled  in  its  kind. 


THOMAS  CARLYLE   (1795-1881) 

Carlyle  was  a  poet  in  prose,  as  Ruskin,  marvellously  elo- 
quent, never  was.  Thus  when  Ruskin  wrote  verse,  it  was 
lamentable,  not  because  it  was  uncouth,  like  Carlyle's  few 
uneasy  fragments,  but  because  there  was  no  poet  at  work  in  it 
Carlyle  has  said  supreme  things  about  a  few  great  poets  whom 
he  cared  for  most ;  he  has  shown  a  sense  of  what  poetry  really 
was,  under  a  cynic's  cloak  of  ragged  contempt.  Has  anything 
more  fundamental  been  said  of  drama  than  this,  in  a  letter 
to  Barry  Cornwall : '  What  I  object  to  in  our  damnable  drama- 
tists is :  that  they  have  in  them  no  thing,  no  event  or  character, 
that  looks  musical  and  glorious  to  them '?  Many  things  looked 
so  to  Carlyle,  but  he  had  no  skill  beyond  his  prose.  His  ear 
could  not  discriminate  between  the  good  line  and  the  bad, 
and  in  his  few  attempts  at  verse  he  has  chosen  the  bad  tune 
because  he  could  not  help  it.  Some  of  the  best  sayings  in  them 
seem  as  if  translated  laboriously  from  the  German,  as  in  this 

stanza:  — 

'What  is  Man?  A  foolish  baby, 
Vainly  strives,  and  fights,  and  frets; 
Demanding  all,  deserving  nothing; 
One  small  grave  is  all  he  gets.' 


298    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

He  tries  to  call  back  for  his  use  the  old  ballad  form,  with  its 
repetitions,  and  is  then  at  his  best,  particularly  in  the  sen- 
tentious little  song  of  the  wind's  way:  — 

'The  wind  blows  east,  the  wind  blows  west, 
And  the  frost  falls  and  the  rain; 
A  weary  heart  went  thankful  to  rest, 
And  must  rise  to  toil  again,  'gain, 
And  must  rise  to  toil  again.' 

How  that  stumbles,  unable  to  say  what  it  wants,  like  the 
epigram  on  the  beetle :  — 

'What  Debrett's  peer  surpasseth  thee? 
Thy  ancestor  was  in  Noah's  Ark.' 

It  is  Dr.  Garnett,  who,  in  one  of  his  characteristic  images,  has 
said  the  final  thing:  'The  demand  for  poetical  form  is  to  Car- 
lyle  what  the  vase  is  to  the  imprisoned  Genie,  abolish  it  and 
the  mighty  figure  overshadows  land  and  sea.' 


JOHN  KEATS  (1795-1821)  * 

Keats  had  the  courage  of  the  intellect  and  the  cowardice 
of  the  nerves.  That  'terrier-like  resoluteness'  which  a  school- 
fellow observed  in  him  as  a  boy  was  still  strong  when  the  first 
certainty  of  his  death  came  to  him.  'Difficulties  nerve  the 
spirit  of  a  man,'  he  wrote,  with  a  full  sense  of  the  truth  to 
himself  of  what  he  was  saying ;  and  there  is  genuine  intellec- 
tual courage  in  the  quaint  summing-up:  'I  never  quite  de- 
spair, and  I  read  Shakespeare.'  When  the  'Quarterly'  and 
'  Blackwood '  attacked  him,  he  wrote : '  Praise  or  blame  has  but 

1  (1)  Poems,  1817.  (2)  Endymion.  A  Romance,  1818.  (3)  Lamia, 
Isabella,  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes,  and  other  Poems,  1820.  (4)  Poetical  Works, 
published  by  Smith,  1840  and  1841.  (5)  Poetical  Works,  Moxon,  1846- 
1851.  (6)  Life,  Letters,  and  Literary  Remains,  edited  by  Richard  Monck- 
ton  Milnes,  2  vols.,  1848.  (7)  Poetical  Works,  Aldine  Edition,  1876. 
(8)  Poetical  and  other  Writings  now  first  brought  together,  edited  by  H. 
Buxton  Forman,  4  vols.,  1883. 


JOHN   KEATS  299 

a  momentary  effect  on  the  man  whose  love  of  beauty  in  the 
abstract  makes  him  a  severe  critic  on  his  own  works.'  But,  at 
the  age  of  seventeen,  he  could  write,  with  an  equally  keen  self- 
knowledge  :  '  Truth  is,  I  have  a  horrid  morbidity  of  tempera- 
ment, which  has  shown  itself  at  intervals;  it  is,  I  have  no 
doubt,  the  greatest  stumbling-block  I  have  to  fear;  I  may 
surer  say,  it  is  likely  to  be  the  cause  of  my  disappointment.' 
'I  carry  all  matters  to  an  extreme,'  he  says  elsewhere,  'so 
that,  when  I  have  any  little  vexation,  it  grows,  in  five  minutes, 
into  a  theme  for  Sophocles.'  To  the  man  who  has  nerves  like 
this,  calmness  under  emotion  is  impossible;  all  that  can  be 
asked  of  him  is  that  he  shall  realise  his  own  condition,  and,  as 
far  as  may  be,  make  allowances  for  it.  This,  until  perhaps  the 
very  end,  when,  on  his  death-bed,  he  put  aside  unopened  the 
letters  that  he  dared  not  read,  Keats  had  always  the  intellec- 
tual strength  to  do ;  after  the  event,  if  not  before  it,  and  gen- 
erally at  the  very  moment  of  the  event.  When  he  writes  most 
frantically  to  Fanny  Brawne,  he  confesses,  in  every  other  sen- 
tence, that  he  does  not  really  mean  what  he  is  saying,  at  the 
same  time  that  he  cannot  help  saying  it.  And  are  not  such 
letters  written,  after  all,  with  so  touching  a  confidence  in  their 
being  understood,  seen  through,  by  the  woman  to  whom  they 
were  written,  really  a  kind  of  thinking  aloud?  A  letter,  when 
it  is  the  expression  of  emotion,  is  as  momentary  as  a  mood, 
which  may  come  and  go  indeed  while  one  is  in  the  act  of  writing 
it  down ;  so  that  a  letter  of  two  pages  may  begin  with  the  bit- 
terest reproaches,  and  end,  just  as  sincerely,  and  with  no  sense 
of  contradiction,  in  a  flood  of  tenderness.  One  is  loth  to  believe 
that  Fanny  Brawne  ever  complained  of  what  the  critics  have 
been  so  ready  to  complain  of  on  her  behalf.  She  may  have 
understood  Keats  very  little  as  a  poet,  and  the  fact  that  he 
tells  her  nothing  of  his  work  seems  to  show  that  he  was  aware 
of  it,  and  probably  more  than  half  indifferent  to  it;  but  if  she 
did  not  understand  him  as  a  man,  as  a  lover,  if  she  would  have 
had  him  change  one  of  his  reproaches  into  a  compliment,  or 


300    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

wipe  out  one  of  the  insults  of  his  agony,  then  she  had  less  of  a 
woman's  'intelligence  in  love '  than  it  is  possible  to  imagine  in 
a  woman  beloved  by  Keats. 

That  man  must  have  loved  very  calmly  and  very  content- 
edly, with  a  strange  excess  of  either  materialism  or  spiritual- 
ity, who  has  not  felt  much  of  what  Keats  expressed  with  so 
intense  and  faithful  a  truth  to  nature.  Keats  was  not  a  celes- 
tial lover,  nor  a  sentimentalist,  nor  a  cynic.  He  was  earthly  in 
his  love,  as  in  the  very  essence  of  his  imagination ;  passion  was 
not  less  a  disease  to  him  than  the  disease  of  which  he  died,  or 
than  the  act  of  writing  verse.  Stirred  to  the  very  depths  of  his 
soul,  it  was  after  all  through  the  senses,  and  with  all  the  aching 
vividness  to  which  he  had  trained  those  senses,  that  memory 
came  to  him.  And  he  was  no  less  critical  of  love  than  of  every- 
thing else  in  the  world ;  he  had  no  blind  beliefs,  and  there  were 
moments  when  even  poetry  seemed  to  him  'a  mere  Jack  o' 
Lanthorn  to  amuse  whoever  may  chance  to  be  struck  with  its 
brilliance.'  Doubting  himself  so  much,  he  doubted  others,  of 
whose  intentions  he  was  less  certain ;  and,  in  love,  doubt  is 
part  of  that  torture  without  which  few  persons  of  imagination 
would  fling  themselves  quite  heartily  into  the  pursuit.  Had  he 
been  stronger  in  body,  he  would  have  luxuriated  in  just  those 
lacerating  pains  which  seemed,  as  it  was,  to  be  bringing  him 
daily  nearer  to  the  grave.  It  was  always  vision  that  dis- 
turbed him,  the  too  keen  sense  of  a  physical  life  going  on,  per- 
haps so  calmly,  so  near  him,  and  yet  as  much  beyond  his  con- 
trol as  if  he  were  at  the  end  of  the  earth. 

Have  you  ever  thought  of  the  frightful  thing  it  is  to  shift 
\one's  centre?  That  is  what  it  is  to  love  a  woman.  jOne's  nature 
no  longer  radiates  freely,  from  its  own  centre ;  the  centre  itself 
is  shifted,  is  put  outside  one's  self.  Up  to  then,  one  may  have 
been  unhappy,  one  may  have  failed,  many  things  may  seem 
to  have  gone  wrong.  But  at  least  there  was  this  security :  that 
one's  enemies  were  all  outside  the  gate.  With  the  woman 
whom  one  loves  one  admits  all  one's  enemies.   Think:  all  one's 


JOHN   KEATS  301 

happiness  to  depend  upon  the  will  of  another,  on  that  other's 
fragility,  faith,  mutability;  on  the  way  life  comes  to  the  heart, 
soul,  conscience,  nerves  of  some  one  else,  no  longer  the  quite 
sufficient  difficulties  of  a  personal  heart,  soul,  conscience,  and 
nerves.  It  is  to  call  in  a  passing  stranger  and  to  say:  Guard  all 
my  treasures  while  I  sleep.  For  there  is  no  certainty  in  the 
world,  beyond  the  certainty  that  I  am  I,  and  that  what  is  not 
I  can  never  draw  one  breath  for  me,  though  I  were  dying  for 
lack  of  it. 

That,  or  something  like  it,  may  well  have  been  Keats'  con- 
sciousness of  the  irreparable  loss  and  gain  which  came  to  him 
with  his  love.  He  was  no  idealist,  able  to  create  a  world  of  his 
own,  and  to  live  there,  breathing  its  own  sharp  and  trying  air 
of  the  upper  clouds ;  he  wanted  the  actual  green  world  in  which 
we  live,  men  and  women  as  they  move  about  us,  only  mora 
continuously  perfect;  themselves,  but  without  a  flaw.  He, 
wanted  the  year  to  be  always  at  the  height  of  summer,  and 
there  is  no  insect  or  gross  animal,  a  butterfly  or  a  pig,  whom  he 
does  not  somewhere  envy  for  its  power  of  annihilating  every 
consciousness  but  that  of  sensuous  delight  in  the  moment. 
Conscious  always  that  his  day  was  to  have  so  few  to-morrows, 
he  clung  to  every  inch  of  daylight  which  he  could  capture 
before  night-time.  And  there  was  none  of  to-morrow's  aloof- 
ness in  his  apprehension  of  human  qualities ;  in  his  feeling  for 
women,  for  instance.  He  demanded  of  a  woman  instant  and 
continuous  responsiveness  to  his  mood,  with  a  kind  of  pro- 
found nervous  selfishness,  not  entirely  under  his  physical 
control. 

'  I  am  certain  [he  wrote  in  a  letter]  I  have  no  right  feeling 
towards  women  —  at  this  moment  I  am  striving  to  be  just  to 
them,  but  I  cannot.  Is  it  because  they  fall  so  far  beneath  my 
boyish  imagination?  .  .  .  I  have  no  right  to  expect  more  than 
their  reality.  ...  Is  it  not  extraordinary?  —  When  among 
men  I  have  no  evil  thoughts,  no  malice,  no  spleen ;  I  feel  free 
to  speak  or  to  be  silent ;  I  can  listen,  and  from  every  one  I 


302    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

can  learn;  my  hands  are  in  my  pockets,  I  am  free  from  all 
suspicion,  and  comfortable.  When  I  am  among  women,  I 
have  evil  thoughts,  malice,  spleen;  I  cannot  speak  or  be  silent; 
I  am  full  of  suspicion,  and  therefore  listen  to  nothing;  I  am 
in  a  hurry  to  be  gone.  ...  I  must  absolutely  get  over  this  — 
but  how?' 

In  all  this  there  is  properly  no  idealism,  but  rather  a  very 
exacting  kind  of  materialism.  His  goddess  must  become  flesh 
and  blood,  and  at  once  put  off  and  retain  godhead.  To  the 
idealist,  living  in  a  world  of  imagination,  which  may  indeed 
easily  be  a  truer  world,  a  world  more  nearly  corresponding  to 
unseen  realities,  there  is  no  shock  at  finding  earth  solid  under 
one's  feet,  and  dust  in  the  earth.  He  lives  with  a  life  so  wholly 
of  the  spirit  that,  to  him,  only  the  spirit  matters.  But  to 
Keats  every  moment  mattered,  and  the  warm  actual  life  of 
every  moment.  His  imagination  was  a  faculty  which  made  the 
experience  of  actual  things  more  intense,  more  subtle,  more 
sensitive  to  pain  and  pleasure,  but  it  was  concerned  always 
with  actual  things.  He  had  none  of  that  abstract  quality  of 
mind  which  can  take  refuge  from  realities,  when  they  become 
too  pressing  and  too  painful,  in  an  idea.  Ideas,  with  him,  were 
always  the  servants,  never  the  masters,  of  sensation. 

What  he  most  desired,  all  his  life,  was  strength  'to  bear 
unhurt  the  shock  of  extreme  thought  and  sensation.'  And  he 
cries :  '  O  for  a  life  of  sensations  rather  than  thoughts ! '  On 
his  death-bed  he  confessed  that '  the  intensest  pleasure  he  had 
received  in  life  was  in  watching  the  growth  of  flowers.'  '  I  feel 
the  flowers  growing  over  me,'  he  said  at  the  last,  with  a  last 
touch  of  luxuriousness  in  his  apprehension  of  the  earth. 
'Talking  of  luxuriousness,'  he  writes  in  a  letter,  'this  moment 
I  was  writing  with  one  hand,  and  with  the  other  holding  to  my 
mouth  a  nectarine.  Good  Lord,  how  fine !  It  went  down  soft 
and  pulpy,  slushy,  oozy  —  all  its  delicious  embonpoint  melted 
down  my  throat  like  a  large  beatified  strawberry.'  And,  in 
a  much  earlier  letter,  he  writes  with  a  not  less  keen  sense  of 


JOHN   KEATS  303 

the  luxury  which  lies  in  discomfort,  if  only  it  be  apprehended 
poignantly  enough,  to  the  point  at  which  pain  becomes  a 
pleasure :  '  I  lay  awake  last  night  listening  to  the  rain,  with  a 
sense  of  being  drowned  and  rotted  like  a  grain  of  wheat.'  In 
this  sensual  ecstasy  there  is  something  at  once  childlike  and 
morbid.  It  is  like  a  direct  draught  from  the  earth,  taken  with 
violence.  And  it  is  part  of  his  unquenchable  thirst  for  beauty. 
'On  my  word/  he  writes,  'I  think  so  little,  I  have  not  one 
opinion  upon  anything  except  in  matters  of  taste.  I  can  never 
feel  certain  of  any  truth,  but  from  a  clear  perception  of  its 
beauty.'  But  Keats,  remember,  was  not  the  friend  of  beauty, 
he  was  her  very  human  lover,  sighing  after  her  feverishly. 
With  him  beauty  was  always  a  part  of  feeling,  always  a  thing 
to  quicken  his  pulses,  and  send  the  blood  to  his  forehead ;  he 
could  no  more  be  calm  in  the  presence  of  beauty  than  he  could 
be  calm  in  the  presence  of  the  woman  he  loved.  With  Shelley 
beauty  was  an  ideal  thing,  not  to  be  touched  by  human  hands ; 
his  was  'the  desire  of  the  moth  for  the  star/  while  Keats',  if 
you  like,  wTas  sometimes  that  fatal  desire  of  the  moth  for  the 
candle-flame.  It  is  characteristic  that  Shelley  writes  his  con- 
fession of  faith  in  a  '  Hymn  to  Intellectual  Beauty ' ;  Keats,  in 
an  '  Ode  on  a  Grecian  Urn.' 

The  poetry  of  Keats  is  an  aspiration  towards  happiness, 
towards  the  deliciousness  of  life,  towards  the  restfulness  of 
beauty,  towards  the  delightful  sharpness  of  sensations  not  too 
sharp  to  be  painful.  He  accepted  life  in  the  spirit  of  art,  asking 
only  for  the  simple  pleasures,  which  he  seemed  to  be  among 
the  few  who  couldnoT  share,  of  pnysical  heaMrr^he  capacity 
to  enjoy  sensation  without  being  overcome  by  it.  He  was  not 
troubled  about  his  soul,  the  meaning  of  the  universe,  or  any 
other  metaphysical  questions,  to  which  he  shows  a  happy 
indifference,  or  rather,  a  placid  unconsciousness.  'I  scarcely 
remember  counting  upon  any  happiness,'  he  notes.  '  I  look  not 
for  it  if  it  be  not  in  the  present  hour.  Nothing  startles  me 
beyond  the  moment.   The  setting  sun  will  always  set  me  to 


304     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

rights,  or  if  a  sparrow  were  before  my  window,  I  take  part  in 
its  existence,  and  pick  about  the  gravel.'  It  is  here,  perhaps, 
that  he  is  what  people  choose  to  call  pagan ;  though  it  would 
be  both  simpler  and  truer  to  say  that  he  is  the  natural  animal, 
to  whom  the  sense  of  sin  has  never  whispered  itself.  Only  a 
cloud  makes  him  uneasy  in  the  sunshine.  'Happy  days,  or 
else  to  die/  he  asks  for,  not  aware  of  any  reason  why  he  should 
not  easily  be  happy  under  flawless  weather.  He  knows  that  — 

'  All  charms  fly 
At  the  mere  touch  of  cold  philosophy/ 

and  he  is  not  cursed  with  that  spirit  of  analysis  which  tears  our 
pleasures  to  pieces,  as  in  a  child's  hands,  to  find  out,  what  can 
never  be  found  out,  the  secret  of  their  making.  In  a  profound 
passage  on  Shakespeare  he  notes  how  'several  things  dove- 
tailed in  my  mind,  and  at  once  it  struck  me  what  quality 
went  to  form  a  man  of  achievement,  especially  in  literature, 
and  which  Shakespeare  possessed  so  enormously  —  I  mean 
Negative  Capability,  that  is,  when  a  man  is  capable  of  being  in 
uncertainties,  mysteries,  doubts,  without  any  irritable  reaching 
after  fact  and  reason.  Coleridge,  for  instance,  would  let  go  a  fine 
isolated  verisimilitude,  caught  from  the  Penetralium  of  mystery, 
from  being  incapable  of  remaining  content  with  half-know- 
ledge.' And  so  he  is  willing  to  linger  among  imaginative  hap- 
pinesses, satisfyingly,  rather  than  to  wander  in  uneasy  search 
after  perhaps  troubling  certainties.  He  had  a  nature  to  which 
happiness  was  natural,  until  nerves  and  disease  came  to  dis- 
turb it.  And  so  his  poetry  has  only  a  sort  of  accidental  sadness, 
reflected  back  upon  it  from  our  consciousness  of  the  shortness 
of  the  time  he  himself  had  had  to  enjoy  delight. 

'And  they  shall  be  accounted  poet-kings 
Who  simply  tell  the  most  heart-easing  things,' 

he  says  in  'Sleep  and  Poetry';  and,  while  he  notes  with 
admiration  that  Milton  '  devoted  himself  rather  to  the  ardours 
than  the  pleasures  of  song,  solacing  himself  at  intervals  with 


JOHN   KEATS  305 

cups  of  old  wine/  he  adds  that  'those  are,  with  some  excep- 
tions, the  finest  parts  of  the  poem.'  To  him,  poetry  was  always 
those  'cups  of  old  wine,'  a  rest  in  some  'leafy  luxury'  by  the 
way. 

That  joy,  which  is  fundamental  in  Keats,  is  a  quality  coming 
to  him  straight  from  nature.  But,  superadded  to  this,  there  is 
another  quality,  made  up  out  of  unhealthy  nerves  and  some- 
thing feminine  and  twisted  in  the  mind,  which  is  almost  pre- 
cisely what  it  is  now  the  fashion  to  call  decadent.  Keats  was 
more  than  a  decadent,  but  he  was  a  decadent,  and  such  a  line 
as  — 

'  One  faint  eternal  eventide  of  gems,' 

might  have  been  written,  in  jewelled  French,  by  MallarmS.  He 
luxuriates,  almost  like  Baudelaire,  in  the  details  of  physical 
discomfort,  in  all  their  grotesque  horror,  as  where,  in  sleep- 


'We  put  our  eyes  into  a  pillowy  cleft, 
And  see  the  spangly  gloom  froth  up  and  boil.' 

He  is  neo-Latin,  again  like  Baudelaire,  in  his  insistence  on  the 
physical  symptoms  of  his  lovers,  the  bodily  translations  of 
emotion.  In  Venus,  leaning  over  Adonis,  he  notes  — 

'  When  her  lips  and  eyes 
Were  closed  in  sullen  moisture,  and  quick  sighs 
Came  vexed  and  panting  through  her  nostrils  small'; 

and,  in  a  line  afterwards  revised,  he  writes  at  first :  — 

'  By  the  moist  languor  of  thy  breathing  face.' 

Lycius,  in  'Lamia/  — 

'  Sick  to  lose 
The  amorous  promise  of  her  lone  complain, 
Swooned,  murmuring  of  love,  and  pale  with  pain'; 

and  all  that  swooning  and  trembling  of  his  lovers,  which 
English  critics  have  found  so  unmanly,  would  at  all  events  be 
very  much  at  home  in  modern  French  poetry,  where  love  is 
again,  as  it  was  to  Catullus  and  to  Propertius,  a  sickness,  a 


306    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

poisoning,  or  an  exhausting  madness.  To  find  anything  like 
the  same  frank  subtlety  of  expression,  we  must,  in  English 
poetry,  go  back  to  the  Elizabethan  age,  to  which  Keats  so  often 
comes  as  a  kind  of  echo;  we  may  also  look  forward,  and,  as 
Mr.  Bridges  notes,  find  it  once  more  in  Rossetti  and  his  fol- 
lowers. 

Keats,  at  a  time  when  the  phrase  had  not  yet  been  in- 
vented, practised  the  theory  of  art  for  art's  sake.  He  is  the 
type  not  of  the  poet,  but  of  the  artist.  He  was  not  a  great 
personality;  his  work  comes  to  us  as  a  greater  thing  than  his 
personality.  When  we  read  his  verse,  we  think  of  the  verse, 
not  of  John  Keats.  When  we  read  the  verse  of  Byron,  of 
Shelley,  of  Wordsworth,  we  are  conscious,  in  different  degrees, 
of  the  work  being  a  personal  utterance,  and  it  obtains  much 
of  its  power  over  us  by  our  consciousness  of  that  fact.  But 
when  we  read  the  verse  of  Keats,  we  are  conscious  only  of  an 
enchantment  which  seems  to  have  invented  itself.  If  we  think 
of  the  writer,  we  think  of  him  as  of  a  flattering  mirror,  in  which 
the  face  of  beauty  becomes  more  beautiful ;  not  as  of  the  cre- 
ator of  beauty.  We  cannot  distinguish  him  from  that  which 
he  reflects. 

And  Keats  was  aware  of  the  fact,  and  has  elaborated  it, 
with  a  not  unnatural  application  to  poets  in  general,  in  one  of 
his  letters. 

'A  poet  [he  writes]  is  the  most  unpoetical  of  anything  in 
existence,  because  he  has  no  identity;  he  is  continually  in  for, 
and  filling,  some  other  body.  The  sun,  the  moon,  the  sea,  and 
men  and  women,  who  are  creatures  of  impulse,  are  poetical, 
and  have  about  them  an  unchangeable  attribute,  the  poet 
has  none,  no  identity.  ...  It  is  a  wretched  thing  to  confess, 
but  it  is  a  very  fact,  that  not  one  word  I  ever  utter  can  be 
taken  for  granted  as  an  opinion  growing  out  of  my  identical 
nature.  How  can  it,  when  I  have  no  nature?  .  .  .  The  faint 
conceptions  I  have  of  poems  to  come  bring  the  blood  fre- 
quently into  my  forehead.   All  I  hope  is,  that  I  may  not  lose 


JOHN   KEATS  307 

all  interest  in  human  affairs  —  that  the  solitary  indifference 
I  feel  for  applause,  even  from  the  finest  spirits,  will  not  blunt 
any  acuteness  of  vision  I  may  have.  I  do  not  think  it  will. 
I  feel  assured  I  should  write  from  the  mere  yearning  and  fond- 
ness I  have  for  the  beautiful,  even  if  my  night's  labours  should 
be  burnt  every  morning,  and  no  eye  ever  shine  upon  them. 
But  even  now  I  am  perhaps  not  speaking  from  myself  but 
from  some  character  in  whose  soul  I  now  live.' 

There,  subtly  denned,  is  the  temperament  of  the  artist,  to 
whom  art  is  more  than  life,  and  who,  if  he  realises  that '  Beauty 
is  Truth,  Truth  Beauty/  loves  truth  for  being  beautiful  and 
not  beauty  for  its  innermost  soul  of  spiritual  truth.  Very 
coolly  the  master  of  himself  when  he  sat  down  to  write,  Keats 
realised  that  the  finest  part  of  his  writing  must  always  be  that 
part  which  he  was  least  conscious  of,  as  he  wrote  it  down.  To 
have  'no  identity' ;  to  be  a  voice, a  vision;  to  pass  on  a  mes- 
sage, translating  it,  flawlessly,  into  another,  more  easily 
apprehended,  tongue:  that  was  the  poet's  business  amid  the 
cloudy  splendours  of  natural  things.  His  own  personality 
seemed  to  him  to  matter  hardly  more  than  the  strings  of  the 
lyre ;  without  which,  indeed,  there  would  be  no  music  audible, 
but  which  changed  no  single  note  of  the  music  already  exist- 
ing, in  an  expectant  silence.  And  it  is  through  that  humility, 
in  his  relations  with  beauty,  that  Keats  has  come  nearer  than 
most  others  to  a  final  expression  of  whatever  he  has  chosen,  or 
been  chosen,  to  express.  Byron  has  himself  to  talk  about, 
Coleridge  the  metaphysics  of  the  universe,  Shelley,  Words- 
worth, each  a  message  of  his  own  which  he  searches  for  in 
natural  things,  rather  than  elicits  from  them;  but  Kpnts  is 
the  one  quite  perfect  lover,  offering  and  asking  nothing,  all 
blind  devotion,  and  witn  an  mexhausribte~memory  fordelight". 

In  his  most  famous  line  he  has  said,  once  for  all :  — 

'  A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  ever.' 
Well,  his  own  poetry  has  much  of  this  joy,  only  a  little  pen- 


308    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

sive,  as  a  human  reflection  steals  in  upon  it  now  and  again, 

of  beautiful,  changeless  things,  new  every  season,  or  every 

morning,  or  every  minute,  but  returning,  with  inevitable 

patience,  as  long  as  time  goes  on.   He  is  watching  — 

'  How  tip-toe  Night  holds  back  her  dark-grey  hood,' 

and  seems  but  to  give  choice  words  to  the  sight ;  seeming  even 

to  come  more  minutely  close  to  the  exact  form  and  sound  of 

things,  — 

'As  when  heard  anew 
Old  ocean  rolls  a  lengthened  wave  to  the  shore, 
Down  whose  green  back  the  short-lived  foam,  all  hoar, 
Bursts  gradual,  with  a  wayward  indolence.' 

He  has  that  power,  which  he  rightly  attributes  to  Milton,  of 
'stationing':  'he  is  not  content  with  simple  description,  he 
must  station.'  He  cannot  name  daffodils  without  seeing  'the 
green  world  they  live  in.'  Distance,  or  the  time  of  day,  must 
be  measured  visibly :  — 

'  There  she  stood 
About  a  young  bird's  flutter  from  a  wood,' 

he  tells  us  of  Lamia  waiting  for  Lycius;  and  when  Lycius 
comes  to  meet  her,  it  is 

'On  the  moth-time  of  that  evening  dim.' 

As  Venus,  in  '  Endymion,'  descends  from  heaven  to  find 
Adonis,  the  silent  wheels  of  her  car,  — 

'  Fresh  wet  from  clouds  of  morn, 
Spun  off  a  drizzling  dew,  which  falling  chill 
On  soft  Adonis'  shoulders,  made  him  still 
Nestle  and  turn  uneasily  about'; 

and  the  doves,  as  they  come  near  the  ground,  are  seen  with 
'silken  traces  lightened  in  descent.'  And,  with  Keats,  abstract 
things  become  not  less  visibly  apportioned  to  their  corner  of 
the  universe  than  the  things  which  we  call  actual. 

'  Obstinate  silence  came  heavily  again, 
Feeling  about  for  its  old  couch  of  space 
And  airy  cradle.' 


JOHN   KEATS  309 

But  his  truth  to  nature,  as  we  call  it,  to  his  own  apprehension 
of  things  seen  and  felt,  is  always  a  beautiful  truth,  differing  in 
this  from  some  of  those  poets  who  have  tried  to  come  closest 
to  realities.  There  are  moments,  rare  enough,  when  he  forgets 
his  own  wise  care  in  this  matter,  and  writes  of  one  who 

'  Bent  his  soul  fiercely  like  a  spiritual  bow, 
And  twanged  it  inwardly.' 

But,  even  earlier  than  this,  which  we  find  in  'Endymion,'  he 
has  learnt  the  secret  of  precision  in  beauty,  and,  at  twenty-two, 
can  evoke  for  us  the  myrtle  that  — 

1  Lifts  its  sweet  head  into  the  air,  and  feeds 
A  silent  space  with  ever-sprouting  green.' 

He  tells  us,  but  always  in  beautiful  words,  because  in  words 
born  of  that  'lust  of  the  eyes'  which  in  him  was  inseparable 
from  sight,  of  'the  tiger-moth's  deep-damasked  wings,'  of 
'the  lidless-eyed  train  of  planets,'  of  the  'chuckling'  linnet, 
the  '  low  creeping '  strawberries,  the  '  freckled '  wings  of  the 
butterflies.  He  realised  at  every  moment  that  — 

'The  poetry  of  Earth  is  never  dead,' 

and  it  seemed  to  him  a  simple  thing  to  transplant  that  poetry 
into  his  pages,  as  one  transplants  a  root  from  the  woods  into 
one's  own  garden.  All  the  tenderness  of  his  nature  seemed 
to  go  out  to  the  green  things  which  grow  in  the  soil,  to  trees 
and -plants  and  flowers,  the  whole  'leafy  world';  as  all  his 
feeling  for  the  spiritual  part  of  sensation,  for  the  ideal,  if  you 
will,  went  out  to  the  moon. 

'  Thy  starry  sway 
Has  been  an  under-passion  to  this  hour,' 

he  cries,  in  '  Endymion ' ;  and  it  is  to  the  moon,  always,  that 
he  looks  for  the  closest  symbols  of  poetry. 

Keats  has  a  firm  common  sense  of  the  imagination,  seeming 
to  be  at  home  in  it,  as  if  it  were  literally  this  world,  and  not 
the  dream  of  another.  Thus,  in  his  most  serious  moments,  he 


310    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

can  jest  with  it,  as  men  do  with  those  they  live  with  and  love 
most.  'The  beauty  of  the  morning  operating  on  a  sense  of 
idleness '  is  enough  to  set  him  on  a  distant  journey,  in  a  mo- 
ment of  time;  and  he  can  reason  about  the  matter  so  subtly 
and  in  such  eloquent  prose  as  this :  — 

'  Now  it  appears  to  me  that  almost  any  man  may,  like  the 
spider,  spin  from  his  own  inwards,  his  own  airy  citadel.  The 
points  of  leaves  and  twigs  on  which  the  spider  begins  her  work 
are  few,  and  she  fills  the  air  with  a  beautiful  circuiting.  Man 
should  be  content  with  as  few  points  to  tip  with  the  fine  web 
of  his  soul,  and  weave  a  tapestry  empyrsean —  full  of  symbols 
for  his  spiritual  eye,  of  softness  for  his  spiritual  touch,  of  space 
for  his  wanderings,  of  distinctness  for  his  luxury.  But  the 
minds  of  mortals  are  so  different,  and  bent  on  such  diverse 
journeys,  that  it  may  at  first  appear  impossible  for  any  com- 
mon taste  and  fellowship  to  exist  between  two  or  three  under 
these  suppositions.  It  is,  however,  quite  the  contrary.  Minds 
would  leave  each  other  in  contrary  directions,  traverse  each 
other  in  numberless  points,  and  at  last  greet  each  other  at  the 
journey's  end.  An  old  man  and  a  child  would  talk  together, 
and  the  old  man  be  led  on  his  path  and  the  child  left  thinking.' 

'Man  should  not  dispute  or  assert,  but  whisper  results  to 
his  neighbour/  he  affirms ; '  let  us  open  our  leaves  like  a  flower, 
and  be  passive  and  receptive,  budding  patiently  under  the 
eye  of  Apollo,  and  taking  hints  from  every  noble  insect  that 
favours  us  with  a  visit.'  That  passive  and  receptive  mood 
was  always  his  own  attitude  towards  the  visitings  of  the  im- 
agination; he  was  always  'looking  on  the  sun,  the  moon,  the 
stars,  the  earth  and  its  contents,  as  materials  to  form  greater 
things ' ;  always  waiting,  now '  all  of  a  tremble  from  not  having 
written  anything  of  late/  now  vainly  longing  to  'compose 
without  fever/  now  reminding  a  friend:  'If  you  should  have 
any  reason  to  regret  this  state  of  excitement  ill  me,  I  will  turn 
the  tide  of  your  feelings  in  the  right  channel  by  mentioning 
that  it  is  the  only  state  for  the  best  kind  of  poetry  —  that 


JOHN   KEATS  311 

is  all  I  care  for,  all  I  live  for.'  Perhaps  it  is  this  waiting  mood, 
a  kind  of  electrically  charged  expectancy  which  draws  its 
own  desire  to  itself  out  of  the  universe,  that  Mr.  Bridges  means 
when  he  speaks  of  Keats'  'unbroken  and  unflagging  earnest- 
ness, which  is  so  utterly  unconscious  and  unobservant  of  itself 
as  to  be  almost  unmatched.'  In  its  dependence  on  a  kind  of 
direct  inspiration,  the  fidelity  to  first  thoughts,  it  accounts, 
perhaps,  for  much  of  what  is  technically  deficient  in  his  poetry. 
When  Keats  gave  his  famous  counsel  to  Shelley,  urging 
him  to  'load  every  rift  with  ore,'  he  expressed  a  significant 
criticism,  both  of  his  own  and  of  Shelley's  work.  With  Shelley, 
even  though  he  may  at  times  seem  to  become  vague  in 
thought,  there  is  always  an  intellectual  structure;  Keats, 
definite  in  every  word,  in  every  image,  lacks^ialeJlactHal 
gjjcnrtiiroH  He  saw  words  as  things,  and  he-aaw  them  one  at  a 
time.  'I  look  upon  fine  phrases  like  a  lover,'  he  confessed, 
but  with  him  the  fine  phrase  was  but  the  translation  of  a  thing 
actually  seen  by  the  imagination.  He  was  conscious  of  the 
need  there  is  for  the  poet  to  be  something  more  than  a  crea- 
ture of  sensations,  but  even  his  consciousness  of  this  necessity 
is  that  of  one  to  whom  knowledge  is  merely  an  aid  to  flight. 
'The  difference,'  he  says,  in  a  splendid  sentence,  'of  high  sen- 
sations, with  and  without  knowledge,  appears  to  me  this: 
in  the  latter  case  we  are  continually  falling  ten  thousand 
fathorns  deep,  and  being  blown  up  again,  without  wings,  and 
with  all  the  horror  of  a  bare-shouldered  creature ;  in  the  former 
case  our  shoulders  are  fledged,  and  we  go  through  the  same 
air  and  space  without  fear.'  When  Keats  wrote  poetry  he 
knew  that  he  was  writing  poetry ;  naturally  as  it  came  to  him, 
he  never  fancied  that  he  was  but  expressing  himself,  or  putting 
down  something  which  his  own  mind  had  realised  for  its  own 
sake.  'The  imagination,'  he  tells  us,  in  a  phrase  which  has 
become  famous,  '  may  be  compared  to  Adam's  dream  —  he 
awoke  and  found  it  truth.'  Only  Keats,  unlike  most  other  ( 
poets,  never  slept,  or,  it  may  be,  never  awoke.   Poetry  was 


312     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

literally  almost  everything  to  him;  and  he  could  deal  with 
it  so  objectively,  as  with  a  thing  outside  himself,  precisely 
because  it  was  an  almost  bodily  part  of  him,  like  the  hand  he 
wrote  with.  'If  poetry,'  he  said,  in  an  axiom  sent  to  his 
publisher,  'comes  not  as  naturally  as  the  leaves  to  a  tree,  it 
had  better  not  come  at  all/  And  so,  continually,  eagerly, 
instinctively,  yet  in  a  way  unconsciously,  he  was  lying  in 
wait  for  that  winged,  shy  guest,  the  'magic  casements '  always 
open  on  the  'perilous  seas/  'The  only  thing,'  he  said,  'that 
can  ever  affect  me  personally  for  more  than  one  short  passing 
day  is  any  doubt  about  my  powers  for  poetry :  I  seldom  have 
any;  and  I  look  with  hope  to  the  nighing  time  when  I  shall 
have  none/  His  belief  that  he  should  '  be  among  the  English 
poets  after  his  death '  meant  more  to  him,  undoubtedly,  than 
such  a  conviction  usually  means,  even  to  those  most  careful  of 
fame.  It  was  his  ideal  world,  the  only  aspect  of  spiritual 
things  which  he  ever  saw  or  cared  to  see ;  and  the  thought 
of  poetry,  apprehended  for  its  own  sake  as  the  only  en- 
tirely satisfying  thing  in  the  world,  imprisoned  him  as  within 
a  fairy  ring,  alone  with  his  little  circle  of  green  grass  and  blue 
sky. 

'  To  load  every  rift  with  ore ' :  that,  to  Keats,  was  the 
essential  thing;  and  it  meant  to  pack  the  verse  with  poetry, 
with  the  stuff  of  the  imagination,  so  that  every  line  should  be 
heavy  with  it.  For  the  rest,  the  poem  is  to  come  as  best  it 
may;  only  once,  in  'Lamia,'  with  any  real  skill  in  narrative, 
or  any  care  for  that  skill.  There,  doubtless,  it  was  the  passing 
influence  of  Dryden  which  set  him  upon  a  kind  of  experiment, 
which  he  may  have  done  largely  for  the  experiment's  sake; 
doing  it,  of  course,  consummately.  '  Hyperion '  was  another 
kind  of  experiment;  and  this  time,  for  all  its  splendour,  less 
personal  to  his  own  style,  or  way  of  feeling.  'I  have  given 
up  "Hyperion,"  '  he  writes;  'there  were  too  many  Miltonic 
inversions  in  it  —  Miltonic  verse  cannot  be  written  but  in  an 
artful,  or,  rather,  artist's  humour.  I  wish  to  give  myself  up  to 


JOHN   KEATS  313 

other  sensations.'  He  asks  Reynolds  to  pick  out  some  lines 
from  'Hyperion/  and  put  a  mark,  x,  to  the  false  beauty, 
proceeding  from  art,  and  1,  2,  to  the  true  voice  of  feeling.  It 
is  just  then  that  he  discovers  Chatterton  to  be  'the  purest 
writer  in  the  English  language.'  A  little  later  he  decides  that 
'  the  marvellous  is  the  most  enticing,  and  the  surest  guarantee 
of  harmonious  numbers,'  and  so  decides,  somewhat  against  his 
inclination,  he  professes,  to  'untether  Fancy,  and  to  let  her 
manage  for  herself.'  'I  and  myself  cannot  agree  about  this 
at  all,' is  his  conclusion;  but  'La  Belle  Dame  sans  Merci' 
follows,  and  that  opening  of  'The  Eve  of  St.  Mark,'  which 
seems  to  contain  the  germ  of  both  Rossetti  and  Morris,  going, 
as  it  does,  so  far  along  the  road  that  Chatterton  had  opened 
up  and  then  wilfully  closed.  It  was  just  because  Keats  was 
so  much,  so  exclusively  possessed  by  his  own  imagination,  so 
exclusively  concerned  with  the  shaping  of  it  into  poetry,  that 
all  his  poems  seem  to  have  been  written  for  the  sake  of  some- 
thing else  than  their  story,  or  thought,  or  indeed  emotion. 
Even  the  odes  are  mental  picture  added  to  mental  picture, 
separate  stanza  added  to  separate  stanza,  rather  than  the 
development  of  a  thought  which  must  express  itself,  creating 
its  own  form.  Meditation  brings  to  him  no  inner  vision,  no 
rapture  of  the  soul ;  but  seems  to  germinate  upon  the  page  in 
actual  flowers  and  corn  and  fruit. 

Keats'  sense  of  form,  if  by  form  is  meant  perfection  rather 
of  outline  than  of  detail,  was  by  no  means  certain.  Most 
poets  work  only  in  outline :  Keats  worked  on  every  inch  of  his 
surface.  Perhaps  no  poet  has  ever  packed  so  much  poetic 
detail  into  so  small  a  space,  or  been  so  satisfied  with  having 
done  so.  Metrically,  he  is  often  slipshod ;  with  all  his  genius 
for  words,  he  often  uses  them  incorrectly,  or  with  but  a  vague 
sense  of  their  meaning;  even  in  the  'Ode  to  a  Nightingale' 
he  will  leave  lines  in  which  the  inspiration  seems  suddenly  to 
flag;  such  lines  as 

'  Though  the  dull  brain  perplexes  and  retards,' 


314    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

which  is  nerveless;  or 

'  In  ancient  days  by  emperor  and  clown,' 

where  the  antithesis,  logically  justifiable,  has  the  sound  of  an 
antithesis  brought  in  for  the  sake  of  rhyme.  In  the  '  Ode  on 
a  Grecian  Urn,'  two  lines  near  the  end  seem  to  halt  by  the 
way,  are  not  firm  and  direct  in  movement :  — 

'Thou  shalt  remain,  in  midst  of  other  woe 
Than  ours,  a  friend  to  man,  to  whom  thou  say'st.' 

That  is  slipshod  writing,  both  as  intellectual  and  as  metrical 
structure;  and  it  occurs  in  a  poem  which  is  one  of  the  greatest 
lyrical  poems  in  the  language.  We  have  only  to  look  closely 
enough  to  see  numberless  faults  of  this  kind  in  Keats ;  and  yet, 
if  we  do  not  look  very  closely,  we  shall  not  see  them;  and, 
however  closely  we  may  look,  and  however  many  faults  we 
may  find,  we  shall  end,  as  we  began,  by  realising  that  they  do 
not  essentially  matter.    Why  is  this? 

Wordsworth,  who  at  his  best  may  seem  to  be  the  supreme 
master  of  poetical  style,  is  often  out  of  key;  Shelley,  who  at 
his  best  may  seem  to  be  almost  the  supreme  singer,  is  often 
prosaic :  Keats  is  never  prosaic  and  never  out  of  key.  To  read 
Wordsworth  or  Shelley,  you  must  get  in  touch  with  their 
ideas,  at  least  apprehend  them ;  to  read  Keats  you  have  only 
to  surrender  your  senses  to  their  natural  happiness.  You  have 
to  get  at  Shelley's  or  Wordsworth's  point  of  view ;  but  Keats 
has  only  the  point  of  view  of  the  sunlight.  He  cannot  write 
without  making  pictures  with  his  words,  and  every  picture  has 
its  own  atmosphere.  Tennyson,  who  learnt  so  much  from 
Keats,  learnt  from  him  something  of  his  skill  in  making  pic- 
tures; but  Tennyson's  pictures  are  chill,  conscious  of  them- 
selves, almost  colourless.  The  pictures  of  Keats  are  all  aglow 
with  colour,  not  always  very  accurate  painter's  colour, 
but  colour  which  captivates  or  overwhelms  the  senses.  'The 
Eve  of  St.  Agnes '  is  hardly  more  than  a  description  of  luxuri- 
ous things :  ■  lucent  syrops,  tinct  with  cinnamon,'  a  bed,  with 


GEORGE  DARLEY  315 

'blanched  linen,  smooth  and  lavender'd,'  moonlight  through 
painted  windows,  'warmed  jewels';  yet  every  word  throbs 
with  emotion,  as  the  poet '  grows  faint '  with  the  lover.  Tenny- 
son's '  Palace  of  Art '  is  full  of  pictures,  each  in  its  frame,  or 
of  statues,  each  in  its  niche ;  but  the  pictures  and  statues  are 
no  more  than  decorations  in  a  house  of  thought,  somewhat 
too  methodically  arranged  there.  To  Keats,  the  thing  itself 
and  the  emotion  were  indistinguishable ;  he  never  saw  without 
feeling,  and  he  never  felt  without  passion.  That  is  why  he 
can  call  up  atmosphere  by  the  mere  bewitchment  of  a  verse 
which  seems  to  make  a  casual  statement;  because  nothing, 
with  him,  can  be  a  casual  statement,  nothing  can  be  prosaic, 
or  conceived  of  coldly,  apart  from  that  'principle  of  beauty  in 
all  things '  which  he  tells  us  that  he  had  always  loved,  and 
which  to  him  was  the  principle  of  life  itself. 


GEORGE  DARLEY  (1795-1846)  x 

Daeley  has  said  more  explicit  things  about  himself,  in  a  single 
letter  to  Miss  Mitford,  than  any  one  else  has  ever  said  about 
him.  '  My  whole  life  has  been  an  abstraction  —  such  must  be 
my  works' :  that  is  his  final  summing  up;  yet,  as  he  thinks  of 
the  fierce  critical  work  to  which  so  much  of  his  time  was  aban- 
doned, he  defines  himself  as  '  like  one  of  Dante's  sinners,  float- 
ing and  bickering  about  in  the  shape  of  a  fiery  tongue,  on  the 
Slough  of  Despond.'  'A  heat  of  brain  mentally  Bacchic,'  he 
finds  in  himself,  and  he  admits :  '  I  have  seldom  the  power  to 
direct  my  mind,  and  must  only  follow  it' ;  and  the  mind  itself 
he  calls  'occasional,  intermittent,  collapsive.' 

Every  phrase  is  a  self-revelation,  and  there  is  little  more  to 
be  said.    Imagination,  of  a  kind,  he  had,  as  the  incoherent 

1  (1)  The  Errors  of  Ecstasie,  1822.  (2)  The  Labours  of  Idleness,  prose 
and  verse,  1826.  (3)  Sylvia,  1827.  (4)  Nepenthe,  privately  printed,  1835. 
(5)  Thomas  a  Becket,  1840.  (6)  Ethelstan,  1841.  (7)  Poetical  Works,  1908. 


316     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

rhapsody  of  'Nepenthe/  only  later  printed  in  full,  is  enough 
to  show  us.  But  Miss  Mitford,  when  she  roused  the  author 
to  his  grateful  confessions,  had  not  read  it  to  the  end,  as  she 
confessed  to  the  world  afterwards.  Nor  is  any  one  else  likely 
to  fix  his  mind  sufficiently  on  these  bright  motes  in  the  air. 
Even  'Sylvia,'  which  has  a  kind  of  pretence  at  story-telling, 
baffles  the  attention.  Only  the  few  loveliest  of  the  songs  can 
be  lingered  over. 

For  Darley  was,  as  he  said  of  himself,  'a  day-dreamer  of 
no  ordinary  extravagance,  and  was  perpetually  creating  such 
labyrinths  of  thought  around  him  that  no  wonder  if  he  was 
sometimes  lost  in  them.'  '  Some  of  his  compositions/  he  says 
also,  '  were  less  irregular,  and,  indeed,  as  works  of  fancy  their 
novelty  of  conception  and  imagery  may  perhaps  recommend 
them  with  those  who  have  just  as  severe  a  contempt  for  me- 
teors, and  just  as  profound  an  admiration  for  paving-stones, 
as  I  wish  them.'  Yet  it  will  surprise  no  one  who  reads  '  Sylvia ' 
that  George  Darley  has  been  forgotten  so  soon,  and  that  he 
made  so  little  fame  in  his  time.  It  is  full  of  fancy,  gaiety,  and 
blithe  singing;  there  are  lyrics  that  echo  Elizabethan  airs  with 
an  almost  deceptive  music;  the  blank  verse  is  continually 
dropping  jewelled  words  by  the  way,  and  there  is  a  strained 
antic  quality  in  the  motley  prose,  like  a  jangling  of  fools' 
bells.  But  there  is  no  clear  path  through  this  fairy  maze, 
this  no  man's  land  in  which  there  are  no  laws,  even  of  an 
inverted  logic;  nothing  that  happens  matters,  and  we  are 
hardly  aware  of  what  is  happening.  'The  benefit  of  a  per- 
fectly unrestricted  design/  though  it  seemed  to  Darley  to 
'  afford  him  the  best  chance  of  succeeding/  may  be  said  rather 
to  have  left  him  with  no  chance  whatever  of  success.  Before 
abandoning  the  reins  to  one's  caprice,  it  is  well  to  know  what 
instinct  or  sense  of  direction  there  is  in  the  fantastic  animal. 
Caprice  is  apt  to  turn  in  a  ring,  and  come  back  to  the  starting- 
place  in  the  end,  which  is  much  the  case  with  '  Sylvia.'  Before 
it  is  over,  before  it  has  even  got  to  its  best  moment,  in  the 


GEORGE  DARLEY  317 

delirious  procession  of  the  fairies,  we  are  a  little  tired  of  the 
journey.  The  whole  extravagance  once  over,  we  look  back 
as  on  a  confused  dream,  out  of  which  we  still  remember  some 
delicate,  thin,  festal  music  of  flutes. 

I  am  not  sure  that  Darley  was  not  right,  and  most  others 
wrong,  in  thinking  that  he  had  put  his  best,  most  living 
work  into  the  two  unactable  plays  of  'Thomas  a  Becket '  and 
'Ethelstan.'  Incoherent,  desultory,  there  are  in  them  fine 
madnesses,  dramatic  moments,  a  flitting  and  aspiring  energy, 
a  coming  and  going  of  a  strange,  personal  poetry.  The  queen's 
dwarf  Dwerga,  in  'Becket/  is,  as  he  realised,  'the  highest 
creation  in  the  work.'  'I  wrote  it,'  he  says,  'with  delight, 
ardour,  and  ease/  and  there  is  a  fine  Middletonian  grotesque 
in  the  infamous  creature  dieted  on  — 

'  rich  snails  that  slip 
My  throttle  down  ere  I  well  savour  them ; 
Most  luscious  mummy ;  bat's  milk  cheese ;  at  times 
The  sweetbreads  of  fallen  moon-calves,  or  the  jellies 
Scummed  after  shipwreck  floating  to  the  shore.' 

The  blank  verse  has  rich  Elizabethan  echoes  in  it,  and  can 
speak  with  this  dignity,  in  the  mouth  of  Becket :  — 

'  'T  is  reasonable, 
I  do  confess,  to  think  that  this  fine  essence, 
Grandeur  of  soul,  should  breathe  itself  throughout 
The  mien  and  movements :  every  word  should  speak  it, 
Howe'er  so  calm  —  like  the  pleased  lion's  murmur ! 
Each  tone,  glance,  posture,  should  be  great  with  it. 
All  levity  of  air,  too  buoyant  cheer, 
The  o'er  familiar  smile,  salute,  and  chat 
Which  sinks  us  to  the  low  and  common  level, 
Should  be  dismissed,  and  giant-minded  things 
Disclaim  the  pigmy  natural  to  most  men.' 

Yet  the  plays  are  the  experiments  of  a  lyrical  poet,  and  must 
be  read  chiefly  for  the  bravery  of  the  writing. 

As  a  lyrical  poet,  Darley  is  most  himself  and  at  his  best  in 
'  Sylvia.'  In  most  of  his  other  songs  (which  have  now  and  then 
a  plaintive  Irish  colour  cadence,  like  that  used  by  him  in  more 


318    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

than  one  poem,  in  which  he  anticipates  a  masterpiece  of  a 
later  writer)  there  is  often  an  attempt  to  spin  his  web  out  of 
too  thin  a  substance,  which  breaks  in  his  hand.  Everywhere 
there  are  little  snatches,  little  flutterings  of  song,  which  are 
felt  for  a  minute  and  then  are  gone.  '  The  Maiden's  Grave ' 
and  '  Love's  Devotion '  are  dainty  elegies ; '  Heroa '  would  have 
pleased  Landor,  and  '  Robin's  Cross '  must  please  all.  But  the 
best  lines  are  in  lyrics. made  consciously  after  Elizabethan 
models,  and  they  are  rarely  so  good  as  these  two  almost  su- 
premely good  ones : — 

'  He  who  the  Siren's  hair  would  win 
Is  mostly  strangled  in  the  tide.' 

Darley's  good  things  are  for  the  most  part  either  scattered 
or  broken.  They  could  never  be  mended  or  brought  together, 
and  he  is  not  likely  to  be  remembered  for  more  than  these 
bright  fragments. 


JEREMIAH  JOSEPH  CALLANAN  (1795-1829)  l 

Callanan  said  of  himself,  in  one  of  his  most  personal  poems : 

'  I  only  awoke  your  wild  harp  from  its  slumber, 
And  mingled  once  more  with  the  voice  of  those  fountains 
The  songs  even  Echo  forgot  on  her  mountains.' 

'  It  is  Callanan's  distinction  —  a  great  one,  though  ignored 
till  now,'  says  Dr.  Sigerson,  who  speaks  with  authority  — 
1  that  he  was  the  first  to  give  adequate  versions  of  Irish  Gaelic 
poems.'  As  we  commonly  find  in  modern  Irish  poets,  even  in 
the  most  remarkable  of  them,  James  Clarence  Mangan,  Calla- 
nan's original  poems  are  not  to  be  compared  with  those  which 
he  re-created  from  the  Irish.  Some  of  these  have,  with  all  the 
Irish  agility  of  lilt  and  sombre  passion  in  the  substance,  a 
certain  rarity  in  the  style,  close  to  the  feeling  which  it  renders. 
The  last  stanza  of  '  The  Outlaw  of  Loch  Lene,'  with  its  lovely 
1  (1)  The  Recluse  of  Inehidony,  1830.   (2)  Poems,  1861. 


SIR  THOMAS  NOON  TALFOURD  319 

Irish  rhythm,  has  a  combination  of  naivete  with  imagination 
that  is  rarely  to  be  found  beyond  the  Celtic  borders.  Listen 
to  this  tune :  — 

1  'T  is  down  by  the  lake  where  the  wild  wind  fringes  its  sides, 
The  maid  of  my  heart,  the  fair  one  of  heaven  resides ; 
I  think  as  at  eve  she  wanders  its  mazes  along 
The  birds  go  to  sleep  by  the  sweet  wild  twist  of  her  song.' 

It  is  that  word  'twist'  which  drops  the  pinch  of  salt  into  the 
bowl. 

SIR  THOMAS  NOON  TALFOURD  (1795-1854)  » 

'  Ion  '  is  the  work  of  a  man  who  might  well  have  been  the 
friend  of  Lamb.  It  is,  as  he  himself  calls  it,  'the  phantom  of  a 
tragedy,'  but  it  is  a  kindly  and  gentle  shade,  and  it  still  makes 
pleasant  reading,  though  it  can  never  have  lived  on  the  stage 
with  more  than  what  came  to  it  from  Macready's  '  extraordi- 
nary power  of  vivifying  the  frigid  and  familiarising  the  remote.' 
Frigid,  though  his  own  word,  is  not  quite  the  word  which  de- 
scribes that  almost  idyllic  quality  which,  attractive  in  itself, 
is  rather  apart  from  the  purpose  of  drama.  Everywhere  there 
is  a  sort  of  faint  irrelevant  eloquence,  and  what  might  well 
be  a  simple  statement,  that  the  headsman  and  his  sword  are 
ready,  is  thus  rendered :  — 

'Even  now  the  solemn  soldiers  line  the  ground, 
The  steel  gleams  on  the  altar,  and  the  slave 
Disrobes  himself  for  duty.' 

Talfourd  came  to  the  drama  oddly,  from  Hannah  More's 
'Sacred  Dramas/  through  Addison's  'Cato.'  What  began  so 
far  away  from  us  comes  in  the  end  to  have  a  certain  kinship 
with  Browning's  early  drama,  in  a  frank  and  manly  pathos 
and  sense  of  friendship.  The  poetry  never  gets  quite  beyond 
the  state  of  poetical  feeling.    Talfourd  seems  unable  to  get 

1  (1)  Ion,  1836.   (2)  The  Athenian  Captive,  1838.   (3)  Glencoe.   (4)  The 
Castilian,  1853. 


320    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

over  his  surprise,  that  anything  so  'feeble  in  its  development' 
should  have  succeeded  for  its  moment  even  on  the  stage,  and 
reminds  us  that  it  was  never  really  intended  to  be  acted. 


JOHN  HAMILTON  REYNOLDS  (1796-1852) » 

It  is  as  a  friend,  companion,  and  fellow  worker  of  Keats  that 
Reynolds  is  best  remembered,  though  in  his  day  he  made  a 
little  place  of  his  own  as  a  satirist,  in  the  unsigned  'ante- 
natal Peter/  as  Shelley  called  the  brilliant  parody  of  Words- 
worth. It  was  reviewed  by  Keats  in  'The  Examiner/  and  the 
review  led  to  Shelley's  'Peter  Bell  the  Third.'  Its  author  said 
afterwards:  'Ah,  which  is  the  serious  poem?'  in  order  to  an- 
swer: 'The  Burlesque,  by  its  having  a  meaning.'  'Peter  Bell' 
was  the  radiant,  gentlemanly  mockery  of  a  poet  by  a  poet, 
itself  a  kind  of  homage  and  criticism  in  one. 

'  I  am  the  mighty  mental  medlar, 
I  am  the  lonely  lyric  pedlar, 
I  am  the  goul  of  Alice  Fell'; 

says  the  '  real  Simon  Pure.' 

Reynolds  had  a  good  technique  in  comic  verse,  and  a 

poetical  feeling  which  expresses  without  quite  achieving  itself 

in  some  of  his  sonnets  and  songs.  But,  as  he  said  of  himself, 

he  '  had  not  the  heart  to  rush  at  Fame ' ;  or,  as  it  has  been  said 

of  him  since,  'he  was  too  light  a  weight  for  a  grave  age.'  His 

early  work  was  imitative,  but  with  a  boyish  freedom.    '  Safie/ 

dedicated  to  Byron,  was  full  of  Byronisms  such  as  — 

'  Despair  is  poison  of  the  heart, 
It  rankles  in  a  feeling  part.' 

'  The  Eden  of  Imagination '  is  a  pleasant  dream  of  a  paradise 

after  Leigh  Hunt. 

1  (1)  Safie,  an  Eastern  Tale,  1814.  (2)  The  Eden  of  Imagination,  1814. 
(3)  The  Naiad,  1816.  (4)  Peter  Bell,  1819.  (5)  The  Fancy,  1820.  (6)  Odes 
and  Addresses  to  Celebrated  Persons  (five  by  Reynolds  and  the  rest  by 
Hood),  1825.    (7)  The  Garden  of  Florence,  1831. 


DAVID  HARTLEY  COLERIDGE  321 

'  The  graceful  willow,  weaving  to  the  breeze, 
A  green  Narcissus  of  surrounding  trees.' 

He  longs  for  '  such  a  scene  of  lusciousness  and  rest '  (Keats- 
like), and  in  a  naive  footnote  declares:  'I  know  no  one  so  fit 
to  inhabit  this  Eden  of  Imagination  as  Mr.  Wordsworth.' 
Finally  there  comes  'The  Naiad/  a  bright  pastoral,  with  some 
songs  of  a  quaint  youthfulness,  recording  the  time  when  'his 
breast  was  young  Maria's  shrine.'  Later  on,  the  influence  of 
Keats  absorbed  all  others,  and  some  of  Reynolds'  own  im- 
pulses seem  to  have  communicated  themselves  back  to  Keats. 
It  was  in  answer  to  two  pleasant,  Hunt-like  sonnets  on  Robin 
Hood  that  Keats  wrote  his  ballad-song  of  'Robin  Hood.' 
It  was  with  Reynolds  that  he  was  to  have  collaborated  in  a 
book  of  rhymed  tales  after  Boccaccio;  'Isabella'  was  prob- 
ably written  to  go  with  '  The  Garden  of  Florence  '  and  '  The 
Ladye  of  Provence'  in  the  book  published  by  Reynolds  in 
1821.  The  best  of  Keats'  epistles  was  one  written  to  Rey- 
nolds, and  we  see  its  wild  fantasies,  about  the  '  Lapland  Witch 
turned  maudlin  Nun/  and  the  rest,  reflecting,  as  in  a  mirror, 
something  of  the  irresponsible  insobriety  of  the  writer  of 
'Peter  Bell'  and  'The  Fancy.' 

It  was  in  'The  Fancy'  that  Reynolds  was  perhaps  most 
himself ;  for  that  book,  '  strictly  familiar  but  by  no  means  vul- 
gar/ full  of  gusto,  the  record  of  a  single  gay  corner  of  a  period, 
suggests  the  man  'good  with  both  hands/  with  his  'game- 
cock-looking head/  as  Hood  described  him.  The  prose,  per- 
haps better  than  the  verse,  of  it,  but  both  rattling  well  to- 
gether, combine  in  a  nonsense  book  as  taking  and  irrelevant 
an  impromptu  as  his  life. 


DAVID  HARTLEY  COLERIDGE   (1796-1849) l 

Hartley  Coleridge   impressed  the   people  who   met  him 

hardly  less  than  his  father;  he  seemed  to  them  a  person  of 

1  (1)  Poems,  1833.   (2)  Poems,  edited  by  his  brother,  2  vols.,  1851. 


322     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

equally  essential  genius.  But  behind  his  wonderful  talk,  in 
the  depths  of  his  sensitive  and  perturbed  nature,  there  was  a 
vast  inertia;  and  the  one,  like  the  other,  was  an  inherit- 
ance. Wrecked  nerves,  hauntings  in  sleep,  absent-mindedness 
amounting  almost  to  hallucination,  an  'impotence  of  will,' 
together  with  'melancholy  recklessness/  a  sense  of  what  he 
called  'triste  augurium,  uneasy  melancholy,'  'the  feeling  or 
fantasy  of  an  adverse  destiny,'  buried  somewhere  in  his  mind : 
how  could  he,  with  all  these  legacies,  do  much  to  turn  to  effect 
that  other  fainter  legacy,  an  instinct  almost  of  genius?  He 
spoke  of  himself  as  'one  of  the  small  poets,'  and  he  was  right; 
his  verse  is  just  such  poetry  as  can  be  improvised  by  genu- 
inely poetical  natures  in  which  the  soil  is  thin.  His  was  always 
'  a  young  lamb's  heart  among  the  full-grown  flocks,'  as  it  was 
said  by  Wordsworth,  to  whom  he  owed  so  much  as  a  poet  and 
as  a  man.  And,  as  he  said  of  himself,  in  one  of  his  best  son- 
nets :  — 

'  I  lived  like  one  not  born  to  die, 
A  thriftless  prodigal  of  smiles  and  tears.' 

'  For  I  have  lost  the  race  I  never  ran,'  he  tells  us,  and  he 

seems  really  never  to  have  started  on  that  race  as  more  than 

a  comforting  diversion.    There  are  splendid  single  lines  and 

passages  in  his  sonnets,  sometimes  as  tenderly  fanciful  as 

this :  — 

'  But  when  I  see  thee  by  thy  father's  side, 
Old  times  unqueen  thee  and  old  loves  endear  thee'; 

sometimes  as  full  of  significant  and   pungent  imagery  as 

here : — 

'  Or  being  bad,  yet  murmurs  at  the  curse 
And  incapacity  of  being  worse, 
That  makes  my  hungry  passion  still  keep  Lent 
In  keen  expectance  of  a  Carnival.' 

The  first  two  lines  might  occur  in  'The  Unknown  Eros/  the 
two  latter  in  '  Modern  Love.'  The  sonnets  are  full  of  poetical 
thought,  and  are  as  pleasant  for  their  substance  as  for  their 


WILLIAM  MOTHERWELL  323 

easy,  gracious  form.  Besides  the  sonnets,  which  are  of  many 
kinds,  there  are  a  few  lyrics,  some,  like  the  lullaby,  'When 
on  my  Mother's  Arm  I  lay,'  Elizabethan  in  colour,  as  are  some 
of  the  sonnet  endings,  not  without  charm  of  cadence.  We  feel 
everywhere,  even  in  the  blank  verse,  really  good  of  its  kind, 
an  accomplished  master  of  language  and  versification.  An 
attractive  temperament  is  seen  through  them  all.  What  is  it, 
then,  that  is  not  in  a  work  which  remains  ineffectual  in  the 
end?  Is  salt  the  ingredient  that  is  lacking? 


WILLIAM  MOTHERWELL   (1797-1835)  * 

William  Motherwell  was  the  son  of  an  ironmonger;  he  was 
born  at  Glasgow,  October  13, 1797,  and  died  there  of  softening 
of  the  brain,  November  1,  1835.  He  was  a  lawyer's  clerk  and 
a  journalist,  and  he  published  in  1827  an  important  collection 
of  Scottish  ballads,  under  the  title  of  'Minstrelsy,  Ancient  and 
Modern.'  In  1832  he  collected  the  original  poems  which  he  had 
printed  at  intervals  in  the  newspapers,  and  was  engaged  on  a 
life  of  Tannahill,  and  with  Hogg,  on  an  edition  of  Burns,  at 
the  time  of  his  death.  A  collected  edition  of  his  poems,  with 
unpublished  or  uncollected  pieces,  was  brought  out  in  1846. 
Motherwell  was  an  adventurer  or  a  trespasser  on  many 
provinces,  and  one  has  to  turn  continually  to  his  exact  date 
to  find  out  whether  he  is  anticipating  or  echoing  something 
with  which  we  are  already  familiar.  He  imitates  old  English 
poetry  more  in  the  spelling  than  in  the  spirit;  his  Scottish 
writing  is  naturally  more  like  the  real  thing,  as  in  the  famous 
' Jeanie  Morrison,'  and  in  the  better  'Willie'  song,  which,  if 
they  do  not  'strike  a  few  bold  knocks  at  the  door  of  the  heart,' 
as  John  Wilson  said  of  his  ballads,  have  at  least  a  suggestion 
of  sincerity  in  their  speech.   His  Norse  war-songs  and  sword- 

1  (1)  Renfrewshire  Characters  and  Scenery,  1824.    (2)  Poems,  Narrative 
and  Lyrical,  1832.   (3)  Poetical  Works,  1846. 


324    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

songs,  his  Turkish  battle-songs  and  all  the  other  exotic  com- 
positions into  which  and  into  the  'Cavalier'  songs  he  put 
most  of  his  force,  have  the  fine  ringing  clink  of  what  is  not 
after  all  sure  steel.  Starting  from  Gray  he  points  the  way  to 
the  versifying  Macaulay.  Some  of  his  light  jingles  he  appar- 
ently caught  from  Moore,  while  in  others,  more  languid  in 
flow,  he  seems  to  anticipate  some  of  Tennyson's  early  ca- 
dences. But  there  is,  among  his  various  attempts  at  ghastli- 
ness  (one  of  which,  'The  Madman's  Love,'  would  be  striking 
if  it  had  less  rhetoric  and  came  to  an  end  sooner),  a  poem 
called  'The  Demon  Lady,'  which  is  either  a  clever  but  extrav- 
agant imitation  of  Poe,  or  else,  as  it  more  likely  was  (for  Poe 
knew  his  work  and  quotes  a  poem  of  his) ,  one  of  the  obscure 
and  almost  accidental  origins  of  Poe's  elaborate  method  of 
repeated  effects.  Motherwell  wrote  with  vigour,  but  his  work 
is  a  series  of  experiments,  all  detached,  and  akin  only  in  their 
general  aim  at  giving  striking  expression  to  striking  subjects. 
He  was  an  artificer  rather  than  an  artist. 


SAMUEL  LOVER   (1797-1868)  1 

Samuel  Lover  is  best  known  to  English  readers  as  the  writer 
of  a  wild  drollery  called  'Handy  Andy,'  which  they  are  too 
easily  inclined  to  take  as  a  pattern  of  Irish  life.  He  wrote 
better  things  in  prose,  and  the  poetical  feeling  which  disguises 
itself  in  them  is  to  be  felt,  speaking  through  athletic  rhythms, 
in  such  uproarious  ballads  as  'Widow  Machree'  and  such 
dainty  ballads  as  'The  Whistling  Thief,'  which  is  as  good  as 
many  similar  things  of  Heine,  and  in  some  ways  better.  They 
are  not  quite  like  anything  else,  even  in  Irish  work  done  before 
and  after  them,  like  '  The  Groves  of  Blarney '  of  Richard  Alfred 
Milliken,  who  wrote  that  irresistible  solemn  nonsense  ode, 

1  (1)  Songs  and  Ballads,   1839.     (2)  Irish  Lyrics,  1858.    (3)  Rival 
Rhymes,  1859.    (4)  Volunteer  Songs,  1859. 


DAVID  MACBETH  MOIR  325 

which  Peacock  would  have  envied.  There  is  little  of  Lover's 
verse  to  be  interested  in,  but  the  best  things  give  one  a  queer 
kind  of  pleasure. 


ROBERT  POLLOK   (1798-1827)  » 

The  final  criticism  of  Pollok's  '  Course  of  Time '  was  written 
by  Frere  on  the  fly-leaf  of  that  strictly  prose  production. 

'  Robert  Pollok,  A.  M. !  this  work  of  yours 
Is  meant,  I  do  not  doubt,  extremely  well, 
And  the  design  I  deem  most  laudable ; 
But  since  I  find  the  book  laid  on  my  table, 
I  shall  presume  (with  the  fair  owner's  leave) 
To  note  a  single  slight  deficiency : 
I  mean,  in  short  (since  it  is  called  a  poem), 
That  in  the  course  of  ten  successive  books 
If  something  in  the  shape  of  poetry 
Were  to  be  met  with,  we  should  like  it  better; 
But  nothing  of  the  kind  is  to  be  found, 
Nothing,  alas!  but  words  of  the  olden  time, 
Quaint  and  uncouth,  contorted  phrase  and  queer, 
With  the  familiar  language  that  befits 
Tea-drinking  parties  most  unmeetly  matched.' 


DAVID  MACBETH  MOIR   (1798-1851) 2 

For  a  short  time  Moir  obtained  a  sympathetic  public  in 
response  to  a  series  of  'Domestic  Verses'  inscribed  to  the 
memory  of  three  small  children.  They  express  a  natural  grief 
with  sincerity,  but  it  is  the  utterance  of  a  man  who  mistakes 
feeling  for  poetry.  The  many  people  who  once  wept  over 
'CasaWappy'  were  so  sorry  for  the  father  that  they  hesitated 
to  put  his  verse  to  any  test  but  the  easy  one  of  pathos.  When 
he  writes  a  festival  ode  to  Burns  there  is  the  same  genuine 

1  The  Course  of  Time,  2  vols.,  1827. 

2  (1)  The  Legend  of  Guenevere,  1824.  (2)  Domestic  Verses,  1843.  (3)  Po- 
etical Works,  2  vols.,  1852. 


326    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

feeling  and  the  same  incapacity  to  render  it  into  poetry. 
Nowhere  in  all  this  fluent  and  specious  versification  is  there 
more  than  such  improvisations  as  the  '  hurried  life '  of  a  pro- 
fessional man  is  likely  to  leave  time  for. 


WILLIAM  THOM  (1798-1848) l 

The  life  of  William  Thorn  was  full  of  misery  and  distraction. 
He  endured  all  the  agonies  of  poverty  and  privation,  with 
intervals  during  which  he  was  feasted  in  London  as  a  celebrity, 
and  received  large  sums  in  charity  from  admirers  in  America 
and  in  India.  He  once  said  to  his  hosts  at  a  dinner:  'I  retire  to 
my  loom,  gentlemen,  and  those  who  would  best  serve  me,  buy 
my  webs.'  He  appears  to  have  been  a  good  weaver,  but  not  a 
thrifty  one.  At  nearly  the  age  of  fifty  he  speaks  of  himself, 
quite  justly,  as  'not  yet  come  to  years  of  discretion';  he  lived 
not  without  a  certain  disorder,  having  his  own  way  in  his 
habits  and  morals.  But  there  is  no  doubt  that  this  random, 
reckless,  defiant  creature  was  a  man  of  unusual  force  and 
charm,  and  a  man  who  can  characterise  his  feelings  as  he 
goes  away  from  his  wife's  burial  as  'a  trifle  of  sad  thinking,' 
is  not  without  that  sense  of  style  which  comes  from  some 
fineness  of  mind.  Personally,  we  are  told,  he  was  small, 
thickset,  and  somewhat  lame,  with  '  a  face  which  was  creased 
and  wrinkled  all  over,  wherever  a  wrinkle  could  be,  and 
had  an  expression  at  once  shrewd,  humorous,  insinuating, 
and  woebegone.'  The  description  suggests  the  actual  qualities 
of  his  work,  in  which  many  strange  contradictions  are  not  less 
strangely  harmonised. 

Thorn  was  an  instinctive  artist,  and  though  he  imagined  that 

he  had  learned  largely  from  his  'ill-fated  fellow-craftsman,' 

Tannahill,  and  though  he  certainly  and  naturally  learned  from 

Burns,  he  discovered  for  himself  a  kind  of  finish,  a  technique 

1  Rhymes  and  Recollections,  1844. 


WILLIAM  THOM  327 

that  seems  really  elaborate,  and  is  far  beyond  that  of  any  other 
Scots-writing  lyric  poet  of  the  time.  His  sense  of  rhythm  and 
of  epithet  is  equally  certain  and  unusual.  Something  which 
we  rarely  find  in  Scottish  verse  (or  only  in  Burns,  who  had 
everything)  gives  a  curious  quality  to  Thorn's  work :  a  tender 
irony,  which  mixes  with  deep  human  feeling  and  with  an 
almost  playful  sense  of  the  beauty  of  things  and  sounds.  This 
irony  sometimes  turns  fierce,  and  can  be  as  grim  as  in  the 
biting  ballad  of  the  nettle  and  the  'stricken  branch.'  It  gives 
salt  to  sympathy,  and  adds  finish,  a  kind  of  mental  distinction, 
to  poems  that  tend  to  go  the  Scots  way  down  to  sentimentality. 
Like  most  Scottish  poets,  Thorn  sought  for  much  of  his  in- 
spiration, or  for  adequate  forms  for  it,  in  the  national  airs, 
to  which  his  musical  sense  guided  him.  There  is  one  instance, 
which  he  has  set  down  in  one  of  those  notes  which  supple- 
ment the  masterly  prose  'Recollections/  in  which  even  he 
could  not  better  what  he  called  'a  most  romping  stamping 
tune,  with  neither  time  nor  measure '  (though  it  had  both) , 
and  which  I  must  record  here  for  the  joy  of  it :  — 

'Did  ye  meet  my  wife,  Jenny  Nettle,  Jenny  Nettle? 
Did  ye  meet  my  wife,  coming  frae  the  market? 
A  bag  o'  meal  upon  her  back, 
A  bag  o'  meal  upon  her  back, 
A  bag  o'  meal  upon  her  back, 
And  a  bairnie  in  a  basket.' 

But  look  at  almost  every  poem  of  Thorn  and  you  will  find 
a  rhythm  in  which  the  cadences  are  elaborated  and  variously 
balanced,  and  in  which  lilt  and  alliteration  combine  to  pro- 
duce a  rare  singing  music,  not  usually  of  pure  beauty,  but 
with  something  strange,  strong,  often  grotesque  in  it.  There 
are  artful  breaks,  like  the  repetition,  outside  the  normal  mea- 
sure, in 

'  That  waur  green,  green  when  he  was  near  me.' 

Sometimes  the  turns  and  pauses  are  mere  effects  of  har- 
mony, oftener  they  are  all  for  meaning,  but  a  meaning  which 


328     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

seems  to  evoke  sound  in  its  own  image.    A  satirical  poem 

called  'Chants  for  Churls/  written  at  the  time  of  the  birth 

of  the  Free  Church,  would  be  a  pure  delight,  read  properly, 

to  one  who  did  not  even  grasp  the  sense  of  the  not  too  difficult 

words.  Has  Mr.  Kipling  ever  done  so  much  with  the  hammer 

and  anvil  as  this :  — 

'  We  've  kirks  in  ilka  comer, 
An'  wow  but  we  can  preach ! 
Timmer  tap,  little  sap, 
Onything  for  bread. 
Their  sermons  in  the  draw-well, 
Drink  till  ye  stretch. 
We  're  clean  sairt  sookin'  at  it, 
The  deil's  dazed  lookin'  at  it, 
Daud  him  on  the  head ! ' 

There  is  hardly  a  poem  which  has  not  its  own  lilt,  and  an 
epithet  or  two  which  come  as  if  by  surprise.  The  feeling  often 
passes  beyond  mere  personal  record,  and  becomes  almost 
dramatic.  'In  my  very  very  heart  I  found  it/  he  could  say 
of  any  of  his  poems,  in  the  true  sense,  and  he  asks  indignantly : 
'Who  are  they  that  beat  about  in  the  substanceless  regions 
of  fancy  for  material  to  move  a  tear  ? '  He  was  '  a  man  who  had 
something  to  say/  it  was  rightly  said  of  him  by  one  of  his  first 
and  best  critics.  Yet  what  is  after  all  chiefly  remarkable  in  him 
is  the  rare,  almost  unerring,  art  of  his  verse,  which,  as  the  work 
of  a  lame,  drunken,  flute-playing  weaver,  is  not  less  than 
astonishing. 

THOMAS  HOOD  (1799-1845)  » 

Hood  is  one  of  the  great  artists  in  English  verse,  especially 

1  (1)  Odes  and  Addresses  to  Great  People,  with  J.  H.  Reynolds  (who  wrote 
five),  1825.  (2)  Whims  and  Oddities,  in  Prose  and  Verse,  2  vols.,  1826- 
27.  (3)  The  Plea  of  the  Midsummer  Fairies,  1827.  (4)  Epping  Hunt,  1829. 
(5)  The  Dream  of  Eugene  Aram,  1831.  (6)  Hood's  Own,  1839.  (7)  Whimsi- 
calities, 1844.  (8)  Memorials,  edited  by  his  Daughter,  1860.  (9)  Miss  Kil- 
mansegg,  1870.  (10)  Complete  Works,  11  vols.,  1882-84.  (11)  The  Haunted 
House,  1886.  (12)  Complete  Poetical  Works,  edited  by  Walter  Jerrold,  1906. 


THOMAS  HOOD  329 

in  his  serious  play  with  double  and  treble  endings.  No  one 
else  could  have  written  such  a  stanza  as  this :  — 

'Still,  for  all  slips  of  hers, 
One  of  Eve's  family  — 
Wipe  those  poor  lips  of  hers 
Oozing  so  clammily.' 

The  rhymes  would  be  laughable  if  Hood's  sensitive  finger  had 
not  trembled  on  them  and  touched  them  into  pathos.  His 
verse  has  a  strong  beat,  as  in  'The  Song  of  the  Shirt/  in  which 
a  certain  poise  and  weight  are  given  to  a  lilt,  something  as 
Campbell  did,  but  with  an  artifice  more  obvious,  in  'The  Battle 
of  the  Baltic.'  He  uses  repetitions  and  refrains  with  less  arti- 
fice than  Poe,  who  must  have  learnt  the  exact  shape  of  certain 
metres  from  him ;  and  he  has  a  musical  art,  unique  in  him,  of 
getting  crescendos,  sometimes  by  an  unexpected  new  line 
added  with  sudden  effect  to  a  refrain,  like  that  which  ends 
and  intensifies  'The  Song  of  the  Shirt.'  At  moments  he  leaves 
all  that  is  peculiar,  and  what  is  most  personal  in  his  verse,  to 
fall  into  older-fashioned  cadences  as  satisfying  as  these,  both 
funereal :  — 

'  Saving  those  two  that  turn  aside  and  pass, 
In  velvet  blossom,  where  all  flesh  is  grass'; 

and,  more  mental  in  its  picture :  — 

'  When  grass  waves 
Over  the  past-away,  there  may  be  then 
No  resurrection  in  the  minds  of  men.' 

And  he  has  a  quality,  so  simple  and  straightforward  that  it 
is  hardly  distinguishable  from  prose,  which  allows  him  to  say 
at  times  final  and  perfect  things  like  the  famous :  — 

'  We  thought  her  dying  when  she  slept 
And  sleeping  when  she  died.' 

It  becomes  didactic,  but  does  not  lose  its  sharpness  and  neat- 
ness, in :  — 

'  But  evil  is  wrought  by  want  of  thought 
As  well  as  want  of  heart.' 


330    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

An  art  of  saying  almost  unforgettable  things  is  "part  of  his 
various  skill,  and  belongs  to  the  antithetical  mind,  which 
turns  easily  from  a  pun  to  a  moral  contrast. 

Hood  learnt,  in  form,  matter,  and  subject,  from  several 
of  his  contemporaries;  metrically,  no  doubt,  from  Coleridge, 
who,  he  tells  us  with  pride,  was  'friendly  to  my  rhyme'; 
and,  in  epithets  and  natural  colour  from  Keats,  whose  'La 
Belle  Dame  sans  Merci '  he  echoes  closely  in  the  ballad  of 
'The  Water  Lady,'  while  the  closing  imagery  of  the  'Ode 
on  Melancholy'  is  almost  transferred  to  his  own  'Ode  to 
Autumn.'  Lamb,  whom  he  honoured  nobly,  he  comes  some- 
times to  resemble,  but,  in  verse,  for  the  better;  so  that  the 
little  cameo-like  poem  of  'Ruth,'  so  tender,  finished,  and  re- 
strained, is  really  what  Lamb  would  like  to  have  done,  but  was 
never  quite  to  accomplish.  At  his  best,  Hood  has  a  style  which 
seems  to  come  to  him  naturally,  and  to  suit  his  needs ;  but  he 
invented  another  style  by  the  way,  of  which  the  main  in- 
gredients were  Elizabethan. 

It  is  difficult  sometimes  to  know  how  far  Shakespeare,  or 
one  of  the  melodious  minor  people  of  his  time,  is  being  con- 
sciously followed  in  the  cadences  of  some  of  the  longer  poems. 
'  The  Plea  of  the  Midsummer  Fairies '  is  full  of  sweet  fancy, 
woven  with  a  pleasant  ingenuity,  after  one  of  the  manners 
of  the  narrative  poets  of  our  Renaissance.  'Hero  and  Le- 
ander'  is  done  after  a  slightly  different  manner,  and  its  sophis- 
ticated feeling  would  have  been  understood  by  the  people 
who  came  after  Marlowe,  and  began  to  embroider  upon  a 
plain  outline.  'Lycus  the  Centaur,'  with  its  swaying  metre, 
is  a  kind  of  classical  extravaganza,  and  here  the  curious  sym- 
pathy for  what  is  unhuman  in  things,  for  the  unearthliness 
of  fairies,  sea-nymphs,  and  Circe's  beasts,  perhaps  culminates. 
Tragic  mischief,  which  in  the  others  was  of  a  graver  kind, 
becomes  here  almost  a  horrible  thing,  into  which  he  puts 
beauty. 

Yet  in  all  this,  with  its  charm,  strangeness,  and  a  kind  of 


THOMAS  HOOD  331 

novelty  in  its  combinations,  we  have  not  yet  come  to  the 
essential  Hood.  In  'The  Haunted  House'  it  is  often  thought 
that  we  find  him.  Scarcely,  though  the  quality  by  which  he 
resembles  Hawthorne,  the  sense  of  a  mystery  enveloping  real 
and  mouldering  things,  is  there,  and  traverses  a  poem  too 
long  and  too  detailed  to  maintain  its  suspense  throughout. 
Not  even  Poe  has  experimented  so  carefully  and  deliberately 
in  this  particular  kind  of  evil  glamour.  In  'The  Elm-Tree' 
we  have  the  Hawthorne  feeling  again,  and  again  the  idea  is 
hardly  serious  enough  to  justify  so  many  stanzas.  In  'The 
Dream  of  Eugene  Aram  •  Hood  achieves.  Here  what  has  been 
fanciful  in  the  rendering  of  sensation  becomes  a  dreadful  and 
penetrating  humanity,  and  we  realise  that  Hood  is,  above  all, 
an  artist  of  the  human  heart. 

Hood's  verse  is  the  broken-hearted  jesting  of  a  sick  buffoon, 
to  whom  suffering  has  brought  pity  and  taught  the  cruel 
humour  of  things.  It  is  natural  to  him  to  be  sentimental  and 
fantastic  at  once,  a  tender-hearted  Fantasio  who  has  'passed 
the  equinoctial  of  Queubus  with  the  Vapians,'  'a  fag  for  all 
the  town,'  as  he  calls  himself:  — 

1 1  am  a  shuttle-cock  myself, 
The  world  knocks  to  and  fro.' 

Once  or  twice  he  arraigns  the  justice  of  things  on  his  own 
behalf,  as  when  he  says,  in  a  rare  self-confession :  — 

'  But  oh !  as  many  and  such  tears  are  ours 
As  only  should  be  shed  for  guilt  and  shame.' 

With  him  there  is  — 

'Death,  death,  and  nothing  but  death, 
In  every  sight  and  sound,' 

till  his  aspect  becomes  at  moments  almost  that  of  a  deathV 

head  grinning  in  a  mirror.   He  mocks,  as  he  laments,  without 

bitterness ;  and  can  write  a  gay  elegy :  — 

'What  can  the  old  man  do  but  die?' 

but  there  is  always7  a  consciousness  of  how  near  death  ia. 


332    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

The  thought  of  it  is  never  out  of  his  head ;  and  while  in  '  Hero 
and  Leander'  he  sets  it  to  a  pageant  of  watery  beauty,  and  in 
'The  Bridge  of  Sighs'  makes  a  great  tune  out  of  it,  and  sets 
his  verse  shivering  with  the  horror  of  it  in  'Eugene  Aram/ 
he  also  plays  with  it,  and  will  have  his  fooling.  It  is  dreadful 
to  recollect  how  much  of  what  is  mere  trivial  fun  in  his  copious 
and  miscellaneous  work  (making  a  collected  edition  a  kind 
of  posthumous  cruelty)  was  written  by  a  man  joking  for 
money,  lest  he  should  'die  beyond  his  means.'  That  recollec- 
tion takes  out  some  of  the  pleasure  with  which  we  can  still 
read  the  best  of  the  comic  poems.  'That  half  Hogarth,' 
Lamb  called  him,  praising  '  a  prime  genius  and  hearty  fellow ' ; 
but  does  the  epithet  quite  characterise  him?  The  best  pieces 
are  not  always  the  most  famous,  as  for  instance  the  mainly 
meaningless  '  Miss  Kilmansegg,'  which  has  hardly  more  than 
a  juggler's  agility  in  its  tap-tap  of  a  ceaseless  ball  rising  and 
falling  like  a  shuttle-cock.  A  little  space  fitted  best  for  the  due 
exercise  of  that  riotous  fun  which  would  come  whenever  Hood 
called  it,  but  not  always  go  when  the  somersaults  were  over; 
a  fun  never  other  than  sharp,  salt,  alert,  but  most  significant, 
not  in  any  meaning  at  the  back  of  it,  but  in  the  sting  of  its 
rhymes  and  the  crackle  of  its  puns,  perhaps  the  most  accurate 
in  the  language. 

'Eugene  Aram'  is  a  masterpiece  of  horror,  and  in  it  Hood 
perfects  that  style  which  has  an  emphasis  far  beyond  epigram, 
because  it  comes  straight  from  the  heart  and  carries  with  it 
an  awful  inwardness  of  thought.    When,  here,  he  says:  — 

'  A  dozen  times  I  groaned ;  the  dead 
Had  never  groaned  but  twice,' 

there  is  the  same  quality  and  calibre  as  in  the  moral  reflection 

in  'The  Song  of  the  Shirt'  :  — 

'  O  God,  that  bread  should  be  so  dear 
And  flesh  and  blood  so  cheap ! ' 

Since  the  '  Ancient  Mariner '  there  has  been  no  such  spiritual 

fear  in  our  poetry,  and  the  nightmare  comes  to  us  as  if  out  of 


THE  MINORS  333 

our  own  bed,  the  sensations  translate  themselves  into  our  own 
nerves.  The  words  reach  us  like  a  whisper,  from  which  it  is 
impossible  to  escape.  That  imagination,  which  had  hardly 
shown  itself  among  the  thick  flocks  of  fancy  in  all  the  other 
poems,  is  here,  naked,  deadly,  and  beautiful. 

In  'The  Song  of  the  Shirt'  this  drama  passes  into  an  indig- 
nant song,  not  less  human,  and  coming  with  its  splendid 
lyric  quality  to  prove  that  a  conviction,  a  moral  lesson  if  you 
will,  can  turn  red-hot  and  be  forged  into  a  poem.  Here,  too, 
is  'modernity,'  but  of  a  kind  that  can  be  contemporary  with 
every  age.  Only  one  more  human  thing  exists  in  the  work  of 
Hood,  and  that  is  one  of  the  greatest  English  poems  of  its 
kind,  'The  Bridge  of  Sighs.'  It  has  lost  nothing  by  becoming 
the  property  of  all  the  world,  like  the  last  lines  of  the  Emperor 
Hadrian,  in  which  there  is  not  more  final  a  moral,  or  some  of 
those  outcries  and  lamentations  in  the  Old  Testament,  to 
which  it  seems  almost  to  go  back  and  snatch  a  form.  The 
fragility  of  the  metre,  its  swiftness,  as  of  running  water,  the 
piercing  daintiness  of  the  words,  which  state  and  denounce  in  a 
song,  go  to  make  a  poem  which  is  like  music  and  like  a  cry,  and 
means  something  terribly  close  and  accusing.  A  stone  is  flung 
angrily  and  straight  into  the  air,  and  may  strike  the  canopy 
before  it  falls  back  on  the  earth.   That  saying  of  — 

'  Anywhere,  anywhere 
Out  of  the  world ! ' 

has  passed  through  interpreters,  and  helped  to  make  a  rare 
corner  of  modern  literature ;  and  the  pity  of  the  whole  thing 
is  like  that  of  a  great  line  of  Dante,  not  less  universal. 


THE  MINORS 

'  He  and  his  muse  might  be  minors.'  —  Johnson's  Dictionary. 

In  order  that  I  may  omit  no  one  coming  within  the  limits 
of  my  list  who  has  written  anything  in  verse  that  is,  or  was 


334     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

once  thought,  tolerable,  I  have  strung  together,  a  little  in- 
discriminately, the  names  which  follow.  I  hope  that  the  word 
or  two  in  which  I  have  tried  to  characterise  them  may  be 
enough  to  at  least  suggest  the  view  I  take  of  their  claim  to 
be  mentioned.   They  are  given  in  chronological  order. 

The  earliest  I  find  is  Elizabeth  Carter  (1717-1806),  who, 
besides  writing  very  indifferent  verses,  was  a  good  scholar 
in  many  languages,  and  translated  Epictetus.  Next  comes  the 
Rev.  John  Skinner  (1721-1807),  who  wrote  the  rollicking 
song  of  'Tullochgorum,'  which  Byron  admired  for  the  swing 
of  it.  Charles  Anstey  (1724-1805),  a  good  Latin  scholar, 
who  wrote  a  clever  poem  on  a  decayed  Macaroni,  and  the 
more  famous  'New  Bath  Guide'  (with  its  'watered  tabbies, 
flowered  brocades');  he  wrote  with  facility,  which  is  perhaps 
what  his  son  meant  by  'a  sudden  and  peculiar  operation  of 
the  mind  (not  easily  described)  resolving  itself,  as  it  were, 
incontinently  into  verse.'  Edward  Jerningham  (1727-1812), 
who  Miss  Burney  tells  us  was  'all  daintification  in  manner, 
speech,  and  dress,'  wrote  worthless  verses  during  the  whole 
of  a  long  life.  Jane  Elliott  (1727-1805)  made  a  lasting  fame 
by  writing  one  ballad,  'The  Flowers  of  the  Forest.'  John 
Hoole  (1727-1803)  was  a  translator,  in  the  manner  of  Pope, 
of  Tasso,  Metastasio,  and  Ariosto.  Thomas  Percy  (1729- 
1811),  famous  for  his  'Reliques,'  may  be  forgiven  for  intrud- 
ing some  of  his  own  unimportant  verse  among  so  many  au- 
thentic treasures.  Richard  Cumberland  (1732-1811),  an 
indifferent  dramatist,  the  writer  of  a  rather  ghastly  epic  on 
'Calvary,'  in  one  of  his  odes,  dedicated  to  Romney,  antici- 
pates the  later  worship  of  'Grasmere's  calm  retreat,'  'stately 
Windermere,'  and  '  Keswick's  sweet  fantastic  vale.'  Robert 
Jephson  (1736-1803),  a  writer  of  tragic  and  comic  plays, 
was  praised  by  Walpole,  whose  'Castle  of  Otranto'  he  adapted 
for  the  stage.  Mrs.  Piozzi  (1741-1821),  Johnson's  friend, 
wrote  verse  in  one  century  and  lived  nearly  twenty  years  into 
the   next.     Hannah   Cowley    (1743-1809)   was   the   Anna 


THE  MINORS  335 

Matilda  of  the  two  cooing  partners  in  the  Delia  Cruscan 
couple  (the  other  was  Robert  Merry,  an  even  worse  versifier) ; 
but  in  spite  of  her  abandonment  to  the  sickening  and  platonic 
love-duet  between  two  poetasters,  she  has  left  some  comedies, 
among  them  'The  Belle's  Stratagem,'  which  are  still  some- 
times seen  on  the  stage.  Charles  Morris  (1745-1838),  'the 
inimitable  Captain  Morris/  was  punch-maker  and  bard  of  the 
Beefsteak  Society,  and  he  wrote  songs  savoured  to  its  table. 
Henry  James  Pye  (1745-1813),  the  'Poetical  Pye,'  meatless 
and  savourless,  was  poet  laureate  from  1790  to  1833.  Anna 
Seward  (1747-1809),  the  Swan  of  Lichfield,  who  while  living 
had  'thrown  an  unfettered  hand,'  she  tells  us,  'over  the  lyre 
of  Horace'  (unfettered,  that  is,  by  too  close  an  acquaintance 
with  the  text  in  Latin),  left  a  cruel  legacy  to  Sir  Walter  Scott, 
—  her  poems  to  publish.  Charlotte  Smith  (1749-1806), 
who  translated  '  Manon  Lescaut,'  and  was  a  guest  of  Hayley 
at  Eartham,  wrote  better  verse  than  her  host's,  genuine  in 
its  observation  of  nature,  and  not  without  a  small  personal 
skill  and  taste.  Neil  Douglas  (1750-1823),  'minister  of 
the  Word  of  God,'  wrote  a  pious  play,  in  tedious  ten-syllable 
couplets,  'the  Royal  Penitent,  or  True  Repentance  Exempli- 
fied by  David,  King  of  Israel,'  in  which  he  is  concerned  partly 
in  giving  'Serious  Hints  at  this  Awful  Crisis'  of  'David's 
unhappy  affair  with  Bathsheba.'  Lady  Anne  Bernard 
(1750-1825)  wrote,  at  the  age  of  twenty-one,  the  popular  and 
still  remembered  'Auld  Robin  Gray.'  Richard  Brinsley 
Sheridan  (1751-1816)  jingled  once  or  twice  in  rhyme  to  put 
a  moment's  pause  to  his  prose  liveliness.  William  Roscoe 
(1753-1831),  the  first  English  student  of  the  Renaissance, 
wrote  indifferent  verses  about  slavery  when  he  was  young, 
and  for  children  when  he  was  old.  George  Ellis  (1753-1815), 
the  writer  of  'Poetical  Tales  by  Sir  Gregory  Gander,'  light 
and  lively  society  verses,  was  one  of  the  collaborators  of 
Canning  and  Frere  in  the  'Anti- Jacobin.'  Thomas  James 
Mathias  (1754-1835),  a  somewhat  clumsy  and  spiteful  satir- 


336     ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ist  in  English,  was  a  fine  scholar  in  Italian,  and,  besides  writ- 
ing '  Poesie  Liriche '  of  his  own,  made  numerous  translations 
of  English  poets.  George  Dyer  (1755-1841)  wrote  verse  and 
prose  of  no  importance,  but  Lamb  has  immortalised  his  name. 
William  Sotheby  (1757-1833)  attempted  many  forms  of 
literature,  and  wrote  copious  and  tedious  rhyme,  worthless 
tragedies  in  blank  verse,  and  scarcely  more  tolerable  transla- 
tions of  Wieland,  Virgil,  and  Homer.  William  Thomas  Fitz- 
gerald (1759-1829),  whose  'creaking  couplets'  Byron  de- 
nounced and  Horace  Smith  parodied,  is  only  to  be  remembered 
by  the  'Loyal  Effusion'  of  the  'Rejected  Addresses.'  Dr. 
Sayers  (1763-1817)  was  a  pedantic  writer  of  unrhymed 
verse,  of  whom  sufficient  notice  will  be  found  in  what  I  have 
written  about  Southey,  his  pupil  in  metre.  James  Grahame 
(1765-1811)  was  a  descriptive  and  didactic  writer,  whose 
blank  verse  has  a  certain  natural  simplicity.  Catherine 
Maria  Fanshawe  (1765-1834)  leaves  a  rhyming  riddle,  which 
is  remembered  only  because  it  was  attributed  to  Byron. 
Richard  Alfred  Millikin  (1767-1815)  wrote  a  radiant 
parody  of  a  street-ballad  (itself  afterwards  parodied  by  Father 
Prout),  the  unforgettable  'Groves  of  Blarney.'  Lady  Dacre 
(1768-1854),  a  woman  of  many  accomplishments,  did  some 
translations  from  Petrarch  for  Ugo  Foscolo.  Among  the 
fashionable  rhymers  in  verse  was  William  Robert  Spencer 
(1769-1834),  who  suffered  justly  in  the  'Beautiful  Incen- 
diary' of  the  'Rejected  Addresses,'  and  who  was  'one  of  the 
living  ornaments,  if  I  am  not  misinformed,  of  this  present 
poetical  age,  a.  d.  1811,'  as  Lamb  says  meaningly.  Robert 
Anderson  (1770-1833),  a  writer  of  songs  and  ballads  in 
the  Cumberland  dialect,  had  little  quality  beyond  a  crude 
uncomely  humour  which  seems  to  have  been  characteristic 
of  the  dancing,  ale-drinking,  'night-courting'  Cumberland 
peasantry  of  that  time.  Sir  Alexander  Boswell  (1775- 
1822),  the  son  of  Johnson's  Boswell,  in  the  intervals  of  print- 
ing at  his  private  press  wrote  poems  after  many  masters,  and 


THE  MINORS  337 

a  few  good  hearty  ballads  (like  'Jenny  dang  the  Weaver') 
of  his  own.  Matthew  Gregory  Lewis  (1775-1818),  of  'The 
Monk/  wrote  some  verses  called  '  Alonzo  the  Brave,'  in  which 
he  prepared  a  rhythm  for  serious  use  by  Mr.  Swinburne. 
William  Stewart  Rose  (1775-1845)  outdid  the  humble 
Hoole  in  translation,  in  the  original  metre,  of  Ariosto's  'Or- 
lando Furioso.'  Alaric  Alexander  Watts  (1775-1802), 
who  had,  we  are  told  by  his  son,  '  a  nicely  delicate  discrimina- 
tion in  the  perception  of  tender  shades  of  feeling/  succeeded 
in  drawing  tempered  eulogies  from  Lamb,  Coleridge,  and 
Wordsworth,  which  are  read  to-day  with  amazement.  John 
Herman  Merivale  (1779-1844)  wrote  an  '  Orlando '  of  his 
own  in  the  Italian  manner,  and  better  work  as  a  translator 
from  the  Greek  anthology.  George  Croly  (1780-1860),  a 
prose  writer,  attempted  in  verse  the  usual  Byron  and  Moore, 
bloodthirsty  and  Eastern,  far-fetched  and  rhetorical,  without 
even  success  in  imitation.  Thomas  Pringle  (1780-1834)  is 
remembered  by  his  poem,  'Afar  in  the  Desert'  :  the  verse  has 
a  vigorous  stride,  but  Coleridge  is  certainly  wrong  in  classing 
it  'among  the  two  or  three  most  perfect  lyric  poems  in  our 
language.'  Lucy  Aikin  (1781-1864),  who  wrote  in  verse 
'Epistles  on  Women/  was  better  in  her  memoir-writing  in 
prose  and  her  private  letters.  John  Mitford  (1781-1859) 
was  a  learned  editor  of  Pickering's  Aldines,  but  an  indifferent 
writer  of  verse.  John  Finlay  (1782-1810)  wrote  some  plea- 
sant youthful  verses,  in  some  of  which,  as  he  says,  'nature's 
varieties  wildly  combine/  but  in  no  unseemly  manner. 
Charles  Robert  Maturin  (1782-1824),  the  author  of  'Mel- 
moth  the  Wanderer/  which  is  still,  since  Balzac,  taken  seri- 
ously in  France  and  remembered,  but  hardly  more  than  by 
name,  in  England,  wrote  three  plays  in  verse,  of  which  the 
first,  'Bertram/  had  an  immense  popular  success;  a  just,  but 
under  the  circumstances  ungenerous,  review  will  be  found, 
quite  out  of  its  place,  in  the  middle  of  Coleridge's  '  Biographia 
Litteraria.'    Thomas  Mitchell   (1783-1845)   was  the  best 


338    ROMANTIC  MOVEMENT  IN  ENGLISH  POETRY 

translator  of  Aristophanes  before  Frere,  who  reviewed  him 
in  the 'Quarterly,'  kindly  and  discriminatingly,  in  an  article 
which  has  never  been  excelled  as  a  study  and  example  of 
translation.  The  Rev.  John  Eagles  (1783-1855)  wrote 
in  '  Felix  Farley  '  some  dog-Latin  and  English  doggerel  of 
his  own,  and  here  and  there  a  passable  lyric ;  but  he  was  happi- 
est in  his  renderings  of  some  of  Vincent  Bourne's  Latin  poems ; 
the  owl  one  and  the  solemn  Billingsgate : '  Londini  ad  pontem, 
Billing!  nomine,  porta  est.'  John  Kenyon  (1784-1856)  was 
a  noble  friend  of  poets,  but  his  own  verse  was  of  little  value. 
Robert  Buchanan  (1785-1873),  professor  of  logic,  wrote 
a  play  called  '  Wallace/  which  was  performed  twice  for  a  chari- 
table object  at  Glasgow.  Hewson  Clarke  (1787-1832)  was 
a  satirist,  who  is  only  remembered  because  Byron  replied  to 
him,  rather  rudely,  in  one  of  his  own  satires.  Edward  Quil- 
linan  (1791-1851),  who  married  Dora  Wordsworth,  wrote 
some  pleasant  light  verses  for  albums,  and  showed  a  gentle 
and  amiable  nature  in  the  sonnets  on  his  dead  wife  and  child. 
Sir  John  Bowring  (1792-1872)  did  some  service  to  English 
readers  by  his  translations  from  poets  of  many  countries, 
Russian,  Batavian,  Spanish,  Servian,  Polish,  Hungarian, 
Bohemian,  but  they  were  done  into  very  indifferent  verse. 
John  Anster  (1793-1867),  besides  writing  some  valueless 
verse  of  his  own,  did  a  translation  of  Goethe's  'Faust,'  which 
remains  one  of  the  best  for  lightness  of  touch  on  rhymes  and 
rhythms.  Robert  Story  (1795-1860)  was  a  Northumberland 
poet,  of  whom  Carlyle  said  that  he  had  '  a  certain  rustic  vigour 
of  life,'  but  his  work  was  mostly  over-ambitious  and  of  little 
value.  Thomas  Haynes  Bayley  (1797-1830)  was  once  famous 
as  the  writer  of  cheap  and  common  verses  for  music,  some  of 
which  have  survived  with  the  cottage  harmonium;  in  his  day 
he  was  a  sort  of  bad  second  to  Moore.  Herbert  Knowles 
(1798-1827)  wrote  a  poem  at  the  age  of  eighteen  which 
Southey  and  Dr.  Garnett  admired  to  excess ;  it  has  a  few  good 
phrases,   tolerable  ideas,   and  an  intolerable   metre.    John 


THE  MINORS  339 

Banim  (1798-1842),  the  Irish  novelist,  wrote  'Soggarth 
Aroon'  and  one  or  two  other  sombre  and  passionate  songs. 
John  Moultrie  (1799-1874),  who  was  praised  by  Words- 
worth and  Gifford,  wrote  a  '  Protestant  Hymn  to  the  Virgin, 
and  some  vigorous  sonnets,  one  of  them  setting '  an  anony- 
mous editor  of  Coleridge's  letters  and  conversation  '  conspicu- 
ous on  the  Dunce's  loftiest  stool.'  Mrs.  Catherine  Grace 
Godwin  (1798-1845)  was  praised  by  Wordsworth;  Words- 
worth was  not  a  critic.  Mary  Howitt  (1799-1888),  a  copious 
writer,  who  was  born  a  Quaker  and  died  a  Catholic,  and  who 
lived  almost  through  an  entire  century,  has  left  some  fanciful 
verse,  written,  under  the  influence  of  Coleridge,  in  the  new 
unearthly  manner.  And  lastly  there  was  Alfred  Bunn, 
known  as  the  'Poet  Bunn,'  who  was  born  at  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century  and  died  in  1860,  endeared  to  posterity  by 
his  nickname. 


The  reader  may  be  referred  to  selections  from  four  poets:  Byron 
(Blackie,  1904);  Coleridge  (Methuen,  1905);  Keats  (Jack,  1907),  and 
Clare  (Clarendon  Press,  1908),  which  contain  introductions  partly  taken 
from  this  book. 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Aikin,  Lucy,  337. 
Anderson,  Robert,  336. 
Anster,  John,  338. 
Anstey,  Charles,  334. 

Baillie,  Joanna,  63. 
Banim,  John,  339. 
Barbauld,  Anna  Laetitia,  30. 
Barham,  Richard  Harris,  263. 
Barton,  Bernard,  217. 
Bayley,  Thomas  Haynes,  338. 
Beattie,  George,  234. 
Beattie,  James,  26. 
Bernard,  Lady  Anne,  335. 
Blake,  William,  37. 
Bloomfiela;  Robert,  74. 
Boswell,  Alexander,  336. 
Bowles,  William  Lisle,  65. 
Bowring,  John,  338. 
Boyd,  Henry,  107. 
.  Brydges,  Samuel  Egerton,  65. 
Buchanan,  Robert,  338. 
Bunn,  Alfred,  339. 
Byron,  George  Gordon,  Lord,  239. 

Callanan,  Jeremiah  Joseph,  318. 

Campbell,  Thomas,  191. 

Canning,  George,  106. 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  297. 

Carter,  Elizabeth,  334. 

Cary,  Henry  Francis,  122. 

Clare,  John,  288. 

Clarke,  Hewson,  338. 

Coleridge,  David  Hartley,  321. 

Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor,  123. 

Colman,  George,  the  Younger,  67. 

Combe,  William,  28. 

Cornwall,  Barry.  See  Procter,  B.  W. 

Cowley,  Hannah,  334. 

Crabbe,  George,  52. 


Croly,  George,  337. 
Cumberland,  Richard,  334. 
Cunningham,  Allan,  227. 
Curran,  John  Philpot,  36. 

Dacre,  Lady,  336. 
Darley,  George,  315. 
Darwin,  Erasmus,  23. 
De  Vere,  Aubrey,  232. 
Dermody,  Thomas,  170. 
Dibdin,  Charles,  34. 
Douglas,  Neil,  335. 
Dyer,  George,  336. 

Eagles,  John,  338. 
Elliott,  Ebenezer,  209. 
Elliott,  Jane,  '334. 
Ellis,  George,  335. 

Fanshawe,  Catherine  Maria,  336. 
Finlay,  John,  337. 
Fitzgerald,  William  Thomas,  336. 
Frere,  John  Hookham,  75. 

Gifford,  William,  37. 

Godwin,  Mrs.  Catherine  Grace,  339. 

Grahame,  James,  336. 

Hayley,  William,  32. 

Heber,  Reginald,  215. 

Hemans,  Felicia  Dorothea,  293. 

Hogg,  James,  97. 

Home,  John,  23. 

Hood,  Thomas,  328. 

Hoole,  John,  334. 

Howitt,  Mary,  339. 

Hunt,  James  Henry  Leigh,  218. 

Jephson,  Robert,  334. 
Jerningham,  Edward,  334. 


344 


INDEX 


Keats,  John,  298. 
Keble,  John,  286. 
Kenyon,  John,  338. 
Knowles,  Herbert,  338. 
Knowles,  James  Sheridan,  216. 

Lamb,  Charles,  161. 
Landor,  Robert  Eyres,  207. 
Landor,  Walter  Savage,  172. 
Lewis,  Matthew  Gregory,  337. 
Ley  den,  Dr.  John,  171. 
Lloyd,  Charles,  167. 
Lockhart,  John  Gibson,  295. 
Lover,  Samuel,  324. 
Luttrell,  Henry,  73. 

Maginn,  William,  286. 
Mathias,  Thomas  James,  335. 
Maturin,  Charles  Robert,  337. 
Merivale,  John  Herman,  337. 
Millikin,  Richard  Alfred,  336. 
Milman,  Henry  Hart,  265. 
Mitchell,  Thomas,  337. 
Mitford,  John,  337. 
Mitford,  Mary  Russell,  234. 
Moir,  David  Macbeth,  325. 
Montgomery,  James,  119. 
Moore,  Thomas,  200. 
More,  Hannah,  30. 
Morris,  Charles,  335. 
Motherwell,  William,  323. 
Moultrie,  John,  339. 

Nairne,  Carolina,  Lady,  73. 
Nicholson,  William,  213. 

O'Keeffe,  John,  34. 

Peacock,  Thomas  Love,  230. 
Percy,  Thomas,  334. 
Piozzi,  Mrs.,  334. 
Pollok,  Robert,  325. 
Pringle,  Thomas,  337. 


Procter,  Bryan  Waller,  236. 
Pye,  Henry  James,  335. 

Quillinan,  Edward,  338. 

Reynolds,  John  Hamilton,  320. 
Robinson,  Mrs.  Mary,  61. 
Rogers,  Samuel,  68. 
Roscoe,  William,  335. 
Rose,  William  Stewart,  337. 

Sayers,  Dr.,  336. 

Scott,  Walter,  108. 

Seward,  Anna,  335. 

Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe,  268. 

Sheridan,  Richard  Brinsley,  335. 

Skinner,  John,  334. 

Smith,  Charlotte,  335. 

Smith,  Horatio,  189. 

Smith,  James,  189. 

Sotheby,  William,  336.      • 

Southey,  Caroline  Anne  Bowles,  233. 

Southey,  Robert,  148. 

Spencer,  William  Robert,  336. 

Story,  Robert,  338. 

Strong,  Charles,  228. 

Talfourd,  Thomas  Noon,  319. 
Tannahill,  Robert,  161. 
Taylor,  Ann,  213. 
Taylor,  Jane,  213. 
Tennant,  William,  217. 
Thorn,  William,  326. 
Thurlow,  Edward,  Baron,  209. 
Tighe,  Mrs.,  121. 

Watts,  Alaric  Alexander,  337. 
White,  Henry  Kirke,  228. 
White,  Joseph  Blanco,  169. 
Wilson,  John,  231. 
Wolcot,  John,  27. 
Wolfe,  Charles,  266. 
Wordsworth,  William,  78. 


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